Halo 2 kickstarting broadband gaming?!

To me, Quake kickstarted broadband gaming. There would be 2 classes of players: HPB (high ping bastard) and LPB (low ping bastard). Lots of high pingers at first, then starting seeing low pingers as time went on
 
Quake, CS and BF1942 had a big influence in broadband gaming.


Quake brought online gaming to the masses, CS brought it too their grandmas and kids. And BF1942 made it clear that if you want to play a shooter with more than 32 people in a server you better shelve out money for a broader pipe.
 
It could be. I know 2 people who were pushed to get broadband once they got their hands on Halo 2. Theyre what I consider casual gamers,but massive fans over the series.
 
SOCOM should get a big mention. It is broadband only and sold over 1 million copies for both the first and second versions (the first is over 2 million).
 
I'm not surprised. MS' long-term strategy for the PC market is built on the assumption that broadband connections will eventually become the norm. Broadband is essential for the OS/software distribution model they would like to push the industry toward. Among other things, the Xbox (and more specifically XBL) seem intended to help increase broadband penetration, which now appears to be happening. I'm sure some folks at MS are quite pleased right now.
 
i hope it kickstarts broadband gaming on consoles with controllers in easy chairs. The way it SHOULD be done.

yeah I said it.
 
sonycowboy said:
SOCOM should get a big mention. It is broadband only and sold over 1 million copies for both the first and second versions (the first is over 2 million).

I'd like to see some SOCOM stats just to see how it has compared to Halo 2. I know during the day, there wasn't an Xbox game that came even close to posting the kind of online numbers that SOCOM had.
 
Yeah, definitely, SOCOM deserves some credit, but it hasn't quadrupled traffic on servers. I mean, there might be as many people or more playing it, but it isn't as demanding on servers as Halo 2. Same to a lesser extent with PC games.

At the same time, this effect can't be really taken as a market shift until we find out if people are still playing Halo 2 a year from now and have renewed their XBL memberships.
 
Subitai said:
Yeah, definitely, SOCOM deserves some credit, but it hasn't quadrupled traffic on servers. I mean, there might be as many people or more playing it, but it isn't as demanding on servers as Halo 2. Same to a lesser extent with PC games.

Not quite sure what you mean. Traffic on servers? I'm talking about consumers that bought broadband to play games (or at least, games that require broadband to play that did well).

SOCOM has had since August 2002, an average of 20-30k simultaneous players a night. That's over 2 years of dedicated broadband gaming with tremendous regularity.
 
But remember:

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