The cost of Warcraft
Rory Cellan-Jones
17 Oct 08, 16:07 GMT
If you’ve got any bandwidth limit on your internet use, you may have bust through it this week, especially if you have a teenage son. Why? Well it could be the cost of war - or rather world of warcraft
I’ve been keeping a close eye on my bandwidth use at home because I keep breaking through my 25gb per month limit. When I signed up to my ISP I thought that would be ample, but then found that we were using as much as
1 a day, which seemed a lot. Then on Wednesday this week we broke all records, with more than 2gb downloaded. I was away from home, my wife’s surfing habits are mostly limited to reading obscure economics blogs, so the spotlight fell on our teenage son, who spends a certain amount of time online in his room in the loft.
He was quick to come clean: “I did use a lot yesterday because a big patch for a game came out,” he told me. The game was World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) - and, according to a colleague who is another WoW fanatic, the patch was around 2gb and took him almost a day to download, even on his reasonably fast connection. The online multiplayer game is about to release an expansion pack, a huge event for warcrafters, and this patch is apparently essential for those gearing up for the next version.
Now I don’t resent my son’s gaming habit - he does do his homework in between battling orcs and he’s an invaluable source of information about a subculture which is a bit of a mystery for a man of my age. Reading through the notes about the patch, I realised again just how little I understand. It promises, apparently, “a hunter pet skill revamp, new talents and spells for existing classes, and the implementation of barber shops for players.”
Err, right. But it’s all set me thinking about the extraordinary impact that online gaming is having, both as a business and as a user of consumer bandwidth. We hear a lot about another virtual world, Second Life, but that’s more of a media phenomenon than a commercial success. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has around 11 million subscribers paying around £9 per month to play the game. That’s one very lucrative business, and something that other game franchises are seeking to emulate.
But World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) - and other online games - are also sending a lot of data back and forth across the internet, even when they are not issuing 2gb patches. How much is difficult to tell. I’ve just read a technical paper by Austrian scientists called “Traffic Analysis and Modeling for World of Warcraft” (pdf link), and I’m none the wiser, though I think what they’re saying is those gamers use a lot of bandwidth. My ISP said they’d seen the effect on traffic of the patch, but did not know how much impact normal gaming had.
When I spoke to Neil Armstrong from another internet service provider PlusNet, he confirmed that the World of Warcraft update had certainly been a major event: “It’s a very big patch… we’ve seen a very significant increase in traffic.” And he said online gaming in general did use up quite a bit of bandwidth - around 120Mb for a four-hour session. Not as much, though, as streaming video services like the iPlayer, which Plusnet’s usage monitor tells me uses 250Mb an hour.
But it’s clear that together online gaming and video streaming are having a dramatic impact on the amount of bandwidth consumers use - and they are increasingly having to pay for that. Mr Armstrong told me that a couple of years ago his average customer would rarely use more than 2gb a month, whereas now that’s up to around 7gb. He said a third of customers using Plusnet’s 15gb a month service were now finding they needed to top up, at 75p a gigabyte, for extra bandwidth. In other words, without really noticing, we’re now paying more to go on a Warcraft quest or catch up on that missed episode of Strictly Come Dancing.
In my case, it means I’m going to have to shell out to raise my 25gb service with another ISP to 50gb a month. Ah well, I suppose it’s worth it as long as World of Warcraft is quite as educational an experience as my son claims. It’s certainly taught me a bit more about internet economics.
Tags: wow gold，world of warcraft gold
