By Christian Baekkelund
In the mid to late 90s, as the penetration of the Internet into the
home reached a seeming critical mass and numerous computer games started
to have an on-line component, a number of different companies tried
to launch into the internet gaming sphere to become the Internet gaming
portal that everyone would use in the future. These companies, including
Heat.net, Kali.net, Mplayer.net, and WON.net, largely failed. Each
company seemed to try a different business and economic model, and
each company seemed to fail at their variations on this model.
Zone.com (formerly known as the Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone) is
the gaming part of Microsoft's on-line strategy encompassed by the
msn (Microsoft Network). The Zone has only been moderately successful,
but still more successful than most of its predecessors that tried
to take similar market roles. The Zone is a place where players can
logon and play three different types of games against other players:
free, small downloadable games, store-bought games made by various
companies that have an Internet component that fits into the Zone
framework, and lastly "premium" games that players must
purchase and pay a monthly fee to play and can only be played on the
Zone. The small free games are common to other large Internet portals,
such as Yahoo and Excite; they are mainly card and parlor games (such
as Hearts, Backgammon, and Cribbage) with a couple small, frequently
single-player puzzle games made exclusively by the portal for the
portal (such as Alchemy and Bejeweled at the Zone). The store-bought
games are simply games made by other companies that have some special
component in them for easily playing these games against other players
via the Zone as an intermediary to find opponents. For example, Star
Wars: X-Wing Alliance (by Lucasarts) and Mechwarrior 3 and 4 (by Activision)
both have easy in game access to the Zone to find opponents. Finally,
Microsoft has contracted a few companies to make games that are played
exclusively on the Zone for a monthly fee in their "Premium"
section; these games have no single-player component. The most heavily
played game in this section (and on the entire Zone) is one of the
first Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games, "Asheron's
Call".
The Zone is surprisingly popular and well-visited with respect to
its competitors, however, this is largely in part to Microsoft's active
promotion of the site on other parts of msn, and the fact that it's
users feel that it, unlike various past companies, is not going to
dissolve any time soon. The security of the players lets the players
feel comfortable spending time climbing "ladders" of competitors
or developing role playing characters with no fear that their time
spent will soon be fruitless. The most popular section of games, the
small and free games, is of no real difference with compared to the
competitors of that area (yahoogames, excitegames, ea.com), but it
lacks certain competitive record keeping capabilities that regular
players desire to be matched up against people of comparative skill.
In lieu of such, player records, however, are independently maintained
on external fan websites, such as theladder.com. Another curious aspect
of the Zone is both the $10 a month premium section existing along
side the external ad banners that are displayed when visiting the
Zone. The dual profit mechanism seems odd and especially bothers many
of the Premium subscribers, however since so little profit for the
site appears to becoming from that minority of users, an alternative
is not easily foreseeable. Since Asheron's Call is the headlining
game of the Premium section with currently anywhere from 5000 to 25,000
players playing at any single time, it is surprising also that Microsoft
never did a big advertising push for this game, especially given the
large costs that the game generates monthly for Microsoft. However,
given its popularity and despite its high overhead costs, Microsoft
has recently signed a deal with the developers for a sequel. Finally,
the integration of the Zone with the rest of msn is quite poor. The
only very noticeable integration is the use of Zone IDs and Microsoft's
proprietary instant messaging service, which actually only serves
to annoy most visitors to the site who do not use the rest of msn
regularly. It would serve Microsoft's interests best to either try
to link the Zone to the rest of the msn better or to sever any existing
links completely, rather than have the troublesome tenuous connection
that exists.