Business & Games: The Blog

That should be "habits". Whenever I see that, I keep thinking you meant to spell "Hobbits".

Damn it, now so do I. Then again, why not? What with all the hype around LOTRO, it'd fit perfectly. Fixed, ta.

Sorry. I just couldn't take it anymore...

Quite alright, I get the occasional burst myself. To my defense, I'm not a native speaker and, all in all, quite a negligent typer.

Regarding the last bullet, I've been noticing the numbers on Valve's HL2 servers and while HL2's a bit old now (kinda; Episode 2 is getting some buzz and due any day), I'm finding the servers rather sparse. Servers usually number somewhere around a 1000 when I bother to check, and it seems fully half of those are empty. Even the others aren't to capacity; usually anywhere from 6-10 players. That means the concurrency is hovering around 5000 somewhere. Very rough guesswork I concede, but even so I find it somewhat surprising for such a popular franchise. I've searched for numbers but haven't found any yet. However, I do suspect that the consoles are eating up the PC multiplayer FPS market. And if anyone has some numbers, please correct mine.

It's 5 am now so I'll investigate more tomorrow. For now, I found this: http://archive.gamespy.com/stats/

Yep. Confirms it. HL2 multiplayer: 819 servers with 931 players. Right now 831 servers. Of those, if I use the slider to measure, only 20% have 2 or more players in them. Amazing that CounterStrike is so *totally* dominating.

Speaking of Counter-Strike... here come the in-game ads: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=76347

Mhm. Not all that unexpected :) http://businessandgames.com/blog/2006/12/counterstrike_now_with_ads.html

And I remember reading that post, too. Where did those brain cells run off to? I completely forgot.