Games

For those who have children, the popularity of video games is unmistakable. Sony, Sega, and Nintendo are among the chief beneficiaries of holiday season gift-giving. With enhanced computing capability, games are being devised in which the computerized opponent learns the behavior of the player and changes its actions accordingly. The seriousness of games is reflected in the cost to produce them. Production costs regularly exceed $10 million, with some costing as much as $30 million, as reported for the forthcoming game Shenmue from Sega. The desire for ever-faster twitch games with more realistic visual images and sound are propelling a new generation of microprocessors. Among the more important of these are the Sega Dreamcast and the Sony PlayStation II.

Sega Dreamcast uses a 128-bit processor, called the Hitachi SH-4, which has already been introduced in Japan in the fourth quarter of 1998 and will be introduced in the United States in the fourth quarter of 1999. Not to be outdone, Sony and Toshiba announced a new generation of PlayStation processors, called PlayStation II, in February 1999. Shipments are planned for the fourth quarter of 2000. This is also a 128-bit processor, but with more memory than Dreamcast (32 MB), an embedded graphics chip, an embedded sound synthesizer, and a digital video disk (DVD). Sony's assertion is that the chip is capable of three times the number of floating-point operations than a Pentium III 500 MHz processor. Games will be sold in stores on a DVD because the current CD-ROM does not have enough storage. The console also has a high-speed serial interface called Firewire, a software MPEG-2 decoder, or software MPEG-4 decoder. MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are discussed in Chapter 2 and Firewire is discussed in Chapter 7, "Home Networks" .

With computing power such as this, the game console could add 3D graphics and interactive services and could become the centerpiece of the home entertainment server, offering some competition to the current Pentium-based platforms now found in the home.

Parallel with increased computing power, the next step for games is to become interactive so human players can play against each other instead of 2D robots. Slow networks can easily perform slow-motion games such as board games, like chess. But what adolescent wants that? For twitch games, in which reaction time is measured in split seconds, fast networks with reliable latency are required. Given the history of the success of chat rooms on the Internet, interactive games would appear to be a natural. In that vein, a number of games have online options. An additional feature of some games is the capability to chat with your adversary or partner, as the case may be, while the game is in process. So you can talk to your opponent just before shooting him.

A major issue with games is the revenue model. It's easy to see how Sega or Nintendo make money; it is less obvious to see how the service provider makes money. Interactive twitch games require a very fast, very predictable network. As we explore later in this book, these networks face a number of issues and thus are expensive. How will the service provider recoup costs?

Will there be a subscription charge for games, such as a premium TV channel? How can the service provider display advertising on the monitor? (There's no way my son will be looking at advertising just as he draws a bead on his opponent!) The revenue model probably will be transactional. Kids join a group, each pays an admission fee, and off they go into the game and do their thing. After the game, scores are tallied. Then a new group repeats the process. Can Mom and Dad monitor costs?

Despite these problems, the rollout of RBB networks is driven in part by the belief that interactive games leverage the interest in chat rooms and existing video games, and thus are a market driver for RBB networks.