Game Hosting Guide

ClanTemplates.com has announced its Big Battle 3 design contest for clan templates and sigs, which it describes as “a fun and exciting tournament for signature designers to battle against each other for bragging rights and ultimately US$80 for the winner! Each round you design a sig and submit it to battle your opponent/s.” More details on the ClanTemplates development blog.

Global Netoptex, Inc. announced that its Online Game Services Inc. (OGSI) business will use the global IP network of TeliaSonera International to expand into the European game hosting market. OGSi will support more than 25 titles from multiple publishers and developers. While specializing in MMO games, OGSI also offers clan servers for games including Counter Strike, Doom3, Half Life 2 and Battlefield 1942.

“We selected TeliaSonera International Carrier in order to expand our operations into Europe and support the initial release of online games this summer,” Derek Wise, GNi president and CEOWise explained. TeliaSonera International Carrier in partnership with IXEurope will also provide GNi with high density colocation facilities located in Frankfurt, Germany. GNi, with OGSi, is one of the leading providers of managed Internet services in the United States, offering robust, highly competitive infrastructure and bandwidth to the games industry.

Online Game Services Inc. has been refining its game hosting service provider business model since its inception in June 2004. The company now works with a number of online game companies, providing them with fully managed dedicated game hosting services.

eSports event organizer Cyber Evolution (CEVO) said it will continue hosting its online video-game competitions with Dallas-based dedicated server provider Layered Technologies (LT). “Since CEVO relies so heavily on the reliability and scalability of LT, we could not pull off our events without LT,”  said Charlie Plitt, CEO of CEVO. “This is why we renewed our partnership with LT for 2007.”

CEVO holds online video-game competitions in North America and Australia for both amateurs and professional gamers. With a base of over 30,000 registered members, events typically have 2,500 gamers competing for up to $30,000 in cash and prizes. CEVO’s whole online experience comes through the Internet Platform provided through the LT platform, which stores player, team and match data on highly secure and accessible database servers. Layered Tech’s infrastructure operates the live virtual environments for each competition. Since launching in 2005, CEVO and its sponsors have awarded over $150,000 in cash and prizes to event participants.

The B5media blog network has decided to shut down FPS Rantings, its blog about first-person shooter games. Here’s the announcement from B5media’s Matt Scott:

Well folks. Due to a lack of traffic and readership, the powers that be have decided to close the pages of FPS Rantings. It’s been fun and I hope you all enjoyed reading my thoughts and sarcasm regarding the genre of FPS games.

Is there no audience for FPS blogs? Part of the issue may have been the focus of FPS Rantings, which covered a broad range of FPS titles but seemed geared to everyday FPS gamers than competitive gamers. eSports sites such as GotFrag seem to have plenty of readers, as does TwitchGuru (which has the advantage of being part of the Tom’s Hardware Guide network). See our directory of gaming news sites for more reading.

The PC Gaming Blog over at 451 Press has  an item on Reducing Lag in Online Gaming, with 10 tips on ways you can improve your gaminge xperience. Many will be well known to experienced gamers, but the list covers a range of variables that involve hardware (Upgrade Your Computer, Check Your Network Cable, Increase System Cooling), configuration (Close Background Tasks, Reduce the Screen Resolution) and connectivity (Seclect Low-Pinged Servers, Get Better Bandwidth/A Better ISP). Sam also shares a tip from the Filefront Forums that may be new to many players: renaming the .exe can route around game detection functions in popular graphics cards that can imapct the performance of some games.

Online game hosting specialist Online Game Services Inc. (OGSI) has been acquired by long-term Global Netopotex Inc. (GNi) in a deal valued at more than $3 million, positioning GNi to provide “pay-as-you-grow” game hosting solutions to the fast-growing industry for massively multiplayer games. While OGSi specializes in MMO games, it also offers clan servers for games including Counter Strike, Doom3, Half Life 2 and Battlefield 1942.
“Acquiring OGSi is a natural progression,” said Derek Wise, GNi’s president and CEO. “By combining their expertise in the games space with ours in managed services, we achieve increased economies of scale and efficiency to better serve our customers.”

“Combining our two companies clearly strengthens our ability to serve the game industry with innovative hosting solutions,” said James Hursthouse, CEO of OGSi. “We’ll also be taking our ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model into new areas such as interactive TV, video and music services, and social community websites.”

OGSi currently has more than 1,000 blade servers packed into 12 cabinets in 365 Main’s San Francisco data center. OGSi has been developing its game service provider business model since 2004, hosting sites for Ping0 LLC and GoPets Ltd. with the new Hellgate London online game. With its acquisition by GNi, OGSi expects to have over 4,000 additional servers operational for games clients in 10 datacenters worldwide by the end of 2007.

“We’ll be building out these gaming dedicated hosting infrastructure in other data centers operated by 365 Main,” said Hursthouse. “Our goal is to provide the industry with every excuse not to build data center infrastructure in-house. It’s a drastic reduction in risk and cost.”

Gaming network service provider GameRail, has completed a direct connection to the Charter High Speed Internet service network, the company said Jan. 30. The new hookup provides Charter subscribers in Missouri, St. Louis, and St. Louis Metro East with lower ping times to online game servers.
“Access providers and game server hosts continue to jump on the rail in order to offer their customers the best online gaming experience possible” said Blake Ashby, GameRail’s President. GameRail directly connects game players to their favorite game hosts and vice versa, thereby eliminating game play degrading high latency hops on the Internet. GameRail has interconnection facilities in 7 major US markets including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and St. Louis.

Online gamers with broadband Internet service from Charter now have the shortest and fastest path to performance game servers offering popular titles like America’s Army:Special Forces, Battlefield 2 Ranked and Unranked, Call of Duty, Counter Strike Source, Enemy Territory Fortress, Half Life: Condition Zero, Half Life/ Counter-Strike, Halo: Combat Evolved, Quake 4, Teamfortress Classic, Tribes Vengeance, Unreal Tournament 2004, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, as well as dedicated servers and TeamSpeak slot rental.
GameRail’s bypass network delivers a “direct-connect” from the game player to the game host and avoids the congestion and inefficient routing paths of the regular Internet. Once GameRail and the subscriber’s provider of Internet access are interconnected, the subscriber’s game play packets bypass the multi-hop, high latency Internet and hot route on a dedicated, national broadband network connected to the game host.

Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, probably the best-known professional gamer, says he’s not retiring but is teaming up with DirecTV to launch the Championship Gaming Series, a new international pro video gaming league. Wendel announced at CES 2007 that he will become a play-by-play commentator, advisor and official spokesperson for the Championship Gaming Series.

“I don’t plan on retiring anytime soon,” Fatal1ty told TwitchGuru. “But I do want to concentrate on making gaming into a mainstream sport.” Wendel didn’t say whether his commitment to the Championship GaminGS eries would affect his participation on other professional gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Professional League and World Cyber Games.

We’ve recently added some new sites to the Game Hosting Guide directory. These include Game Server Providers DefConServers, Next Generation Game Servers, Clan Base Live, TeanHost Game and Voice Servers UK and Hyperfrag and the LowPing.de Game Server Comminity in the Game Server Administration category. Take a minute and check them out!

Twitch Guru recently had an item titled 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Professional Gaming. One that was of interest to us was number 6, “Pro Gaming Has Its Own Sports Media”:

In addition to being broadcast on MTV, USA Network, and DirecTV, professional gaming has its own dedicated sports media that broadcasts the matches via the Web and reports box scores, stats, and news recaps. For example, GotFrag.com is a site dedicated to covering live competitions with online streaming video as well as news reports, stats and record keeping. There’s also Amped eSports , which covers a variety of professional gaming tournaments and organizations. In addition, Cohesion Productions is currently filming documentaries on the history of professional gaming. And just recently, Gotfrag partnered with Beckett Media to launch the first e-sports magazine, dubbed eSports. A number of other gaming and tech sites are following the trend and increasing their coverage of professional gaming. 

You can find a lot of these sites in the Game Hosting Guide under Game Blogs and Gaming News.