Game Hosting Guide

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.

Microsoft has announced at the Consumer Electronics Show that gamers will be able to connect to Xbox Live through their PCs using the new Windows Vista operating system. The Xbox support is scheduled to kick off this spring with the release of Vista versions of two first-person shooter games: Halo 2 and Shadowrun. Here’s a description:

ShadowRun is an intense FPS experience created for both XBOX 360 and Windows Vista that rewards cleverness and split-second improvisation through a unique combination of modern weapons, ancient magic and advanced technology. Shadowrun will be the first game that uses LIVE to enable cross-platform gameplay. Enjoy text or voice messaging or send invitations to your friends playing Shadowrun on the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live, Team up with or against your friends, PC vs. XBOX 360 – for revolutionary multiplayer gaming.

Halo2 won’t support cross-platform play (players on Xbox 360s vs. players on Vista PC) as this apparently wasn’t envisioned when the game was coded. The guide and gamer profiles will be accessible via Vista, which will be able to use the Xbox 360 controller. The initial release will apparently be missing some features like voice chat and webcams, which will come later.

Microsoft has unveiled additional details for the upcoming Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta coming on Xbox Live this Spring. Last month, gamers were able to register on Halo3.com for a chance to participate in the Beta test. The window for registering on Halo3.com has come and gone but today two additional opportunities have been announced.

One way is by playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live. In order to qualify, you have to play a total of three hours of games on Xbox Live between 12:01 AM (EST) on February 1, 2007 through 11:59 PM (EST) on February 3rd, 2007. According to the press release, if you play three hours of games during this period, you then go register via http://www.halo3.com for a chance to become a beta participant. Specifically, you have to play those games and then be among the first 13,333 players to register at the site.

Then there’s the guaranteed route: Anyone who purchases the upcoming Xbox 360 game “Crackdown” will get automatic entry into the Halo 3 beta. If you have a Crackdown disc you’ll be able to activate and download the beta once it goes live next Spring.

“We realize this latest announcement will spur a lot of questions, most of which we simply don’t have the answers to,” Bungie said on its web site. “While Bungie is obviously involved in the development of the beta and game itself, we don’t make the decisions regarding when, where and how the game content ultimately ends up in your hands. It’s really cool that our fans have the opportunity to share in our game early and in some ways actually help us polish the final product but ultimately we’re just developers – the business and consumer side of things are left up to our partners at MGS. As we get additional info and answers to your questions we will pass them along in future updates.”

Progression Networks will use the meet-me room of the Bandwidth Exchange in St. Louis to enhance connectivity for GameRail, a high speed network that directly connects online game players to the servers that host the most popular and demanding titles. By using a network peering approach to ISPs, universities and game server providers (GSPs), GameRail plans to deliver superior performance to its subscribers. Low latency (“lag”) is crucial in multiplayer first-person shooter games like CounterStrike, where a slow connection can much up gameplay and/or leave a player at a competitive disadvantage. The service, which is free during its current beta period, eventually plans to charge $15 a month for subscribers.

“Because of the Peering opportunities with the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings’ existing clients, we are able to fast start our network and also provide superior performance for our peer’s online gaming subscribers,” said GameRail’s CEO Blake Ashby. “Turning up in a carrier hotel like the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings also give us rapid access to leading carriers to build a national network.”

GameRail describes itself as “is an evolution in the network model specifically designed to minimize latency and improve a computer gamer’s online experience.” GameRail allows gaming traffic to get on the private network in the gamer’s home city and then transit over the private network all the way to the site of the game server. GameRail can reduces network hops (and thus latency).

If you’re interested in learning more about the game hosting/GSP market, check out the Game Hosting Guide for a directory of providers and resources.

Leading managed hosting provider Rackspace will provide web hosting for Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the leading competitive gaming leagues. MLG said it chose San Antonio-based Rackspace for its “enterprise-class infrastructure and global hosting provider with digital media expertise” with scalability capacity to keep up with their growth.

“We have hundreds of thousands of registered users who want their MLG content on demand, so we’ve got a lot riding on the availability of our infrastructure,” explained Paul Sullivan, MLG’s Vice President of Product Development. “Rackspace has been essential in prescribing the appropriate technology architecture for our expanding IT needs. Their technical expertise and 100 percent network uptime guarantee have been instrumental as we prepare for a global expansion of our league.”

Competitive gaming has been experiencing strong growth as it gains media visibility, with champion Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel being profiled in the Wall Street Journal and on “60 Minutes.” Two other major leagues, the CyberAthlete Professional League and the Cyberathlete Amateur League, are hosted at The Planet. Low latency (“lag”) is crucial in the multiplayer first-person shooter games used in these leagues, as a slow connection can muck up gameplay and/or leave a player at a competitive disadvantage.

“Major League Gaming has entrusted Rackspace to develop and manage their infrastructure to run a mission-critical broadband business that requires 100 percent uptime and incredible scalability to meet the demands of their users,” said Glenn Reinus, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Rackspace Managed Hosting. “Uptime is critical for these sophisticated web applications, and we believe that, with Rackspace’s Zero-Downtime Network and Fanatical Support, MLG will enjoy a world-class gaming environment to showcase their ground-breaking media online and at their national competitions.”

Rackspace, which is based in San Antonio, Texas, was recently named the most reliable web host by Netcraft for the sixth time in 11 months this year. The home page for the Rackspace.com web site did not have a measurable outage from March 2004 through November 2005, when it experienced three minutes of downtime, and hasn’t had one since.