Multiplayer Server

[ArmChairGeneral]

I am not sure if this post is welcome in this forum or if it belongs somewhere else, since I am not seeking a multiplayer opponent, but I thought that this forum might have the most people who would be interested in this idea.


My name is ArmChairGeneral, and I love these games and want everyone to play them. I am a new poster to these forums, but I have been a long time lurker and AI-only player for many years.

It seems to me that the biggest thing holding the AGEOD brand back from market dominance in the war game space is the relative difficulty that PBeM players have in playing games against each other. These games are crying out for a dedicated server, hosting multiplayer games across multiple titles. Imagine an easily navigable, possibly web based front-end for file uploading and downloading and back-end hosting of turn resolution. It would be like the X-Box Live of war gaming. It would take a commitment in up-front development and infrastructure, with long-term support and maintainance built into the budget, but it would establish the AGEOD engine as the gold-standard multi-era, multiplayer military simulator in the marketplace.

Not every game customer in the world is interested in in-depth, historically detailed simulations of obscure military conflicts. But every war gamer IS, and so should be playing AGEOD games. This engine is the single best war simulator ever made, and once they get the hang of one of these games almost every era opens to the prospective wargamer. A centralized multiplayer AGEOD environment would become the standard that war gamers naturally cohere around, the dominant online wargaming platform, with easy access to any conflict a player could want with opponents from around the world.

AGEOD has many titles that are still remarkably viable and playable, though they are many years old. They are totally salable and there is still value to be extracted from the work that the studio has already invested in. A multi-player environment would extend the commercial life of and breathe playability into legacy titles. The marketing efforts would draw new customers to the latest titles, who are then introduced to a thriving ecosystem of like-minded fans, with many interesting conflicts and opponents to easily and quickly choose from. If necessary, the system could be subscription based to generate enough recurring revenue to justify itself, with the option to still use player-side hosting for players who don't want to pay for the convenience. Hopefully it would be worth providing for free at some point: a multi-player platform would drive multiple-purchases, justifying some costs. Plus, online multi-player as a feature moves product on the front-end, just look at Call of Duty and World of Warcraft!

Providing a cohesive ecosystem for multiplayer is congruent with, and an extension of the marketing, product development and brand-positioning efforts that the the studio has already invested in. A multiplayer platform would transform AGEOD's market position into what it was always meant to be, a universal military simulator applicable to a huge range of human conflict, a constellation of different, easily accessible, reasonably priced ways to simulate most any conflict a war gamer might want to play.

Obviously, this vision is a little grandiose, and many iterations down the road, but even a bare bones, multi-player facilitator would broaden the overall appeal of the engine to potential customers, retain current ones and open new revenue streams from existing products. Detailed market analyses would need to be compared, but I would not be surprised if they showed that an investment in a multiplayer platform would bring a better long-run return than from producing any given new title, and would secure and expand the customer base for new titles into the future.

[TJD]

I completely agree that a dedicated PBEM server would be ideal for these games. When I first learned of the partnership with Matrix/Slitherine, I thought that part of the reasoning might be just that -- using their server-based PBEM capability, which works really well for quite a number of their titles like Field of Glory. Ageod's PBEM is pretty clumsy, especially if you're playing a 3-way game; I just had one promising game of the Mithridatic War blow up because the host got confused with his various zip files and the turns got out of sequence. That would not have happened on a server-based system. Another issue is the size of the files, which can be very large and inconvenient for email especially if you're going the shared-hosting route. (Not everyone uses Dropbox, alas.)

Just sayin'.

Best,

Tim

[anjou]

If it works for boardgames with VASSAL, its not out of impossobility