Mplayer: История первой бесплатной онлайн-игровой платформы

Computer gaming online service

Mplayer, referred to as Mplayer. com by 1998, was a free online PC gaming service and community that operated from late 1996 until early 2001. The service at its peak was host to a community of more than 20 million visitors each month and offered more than 100 games. Some of the more popular titles available were action games like Quake, Command & Conquer, and Rogue Spear, as well as classic card and board for more casual gamers. Servers and matchmaking was provided through a proprietary client. Initially, the service was subscription based, but by early 1997, they became the first major multiplayer community to offer games to be played online through their network for free. This was done by relying on advertisement based revenues. Mplayer was a unit of Mpath Interactive, a Silicon Valley based startup. The demand for online gaming in the late 1990s resulted in huge growth for the service. They became known for supplying a range of features integrated through their software, including their very successful voice chat feature. This feature proved so popular that it was later split off as a VoIP service to cater to non gamers, dubbed HearMe, which would eventually become the new name of the company. The company was listed on NASDAQ as MPTH and later HEAR. Despite the growth of their gaming unit, Mplayer was never profitable. HearMe continued to refocus themselves on VoIP technologies and, in late 2000, had sold off Mplayer to competitor GameSpy. In addition, some technologies were sold to 4anything. com. HearMe survived the buyout and continued to operate independently. Mplayer was taken offline and integrated into GameSpy Arcade in 2001. HearMe shut down in mid 2000.

The company first began as Mpath Interactive, a venture capital start up co founded in early 1995 by Brian Apgar, Jeff Rothschild and Brian Moriarty, based in Cupertino, California. It was later renamed to HearMe. Mpath Interactive later moved to Mountain View, California, after acquiring Catapult Entertainment, Inc., and their online gaming service XBAND. Not only will people go to the Internet for information, they will also go to it to meet and interact with other people. Mplayer, scheduled to debut 1996, will bring the excitement of real time multi player gaming to the Internet's World Wide Web for the first time. It will feature popular PC based games from well known game publishers. Mplayer's features will include voice capable games and chat rooms where players can converse as they play the games, watch games in progress and choose teams or opponents. In February 1997, they began to offer internet play for free for their major commercial games such as Quake, as well as card and board games such as Scrabble and Spades. They were one of the first major commercial communities on the internet to offer such a service. They continued to add many new games to their offering. The slogan that was used from its founding was "Wanna Play?" and about 80 by late 2000.

Games first offered over Mplayer were by subscription. In addition to the Gaming Service, Mpath also launched a "preferred" ISP service, WebBullet, reselling InterRamp ISP accounts on the PSINet network, the very backbone which Mplayer. com's production services were hosted on. In early 1997, their growth allowed the service to be offered for free through support of its advertising network, which eventually became known as the Mplayer Entertainment Network. However, the subscription model was retained, known as Plus, and gave special privileges to these member who subscribed. The yearly rate was USD $39.95, or $29.95 for two years; this gave access to certain games, their rating and ranking system in Quake and Quake II, as well as online tournaments. Subscriptions had previously been $20 per month, but upon changing their business model to offer many services for free, MPlayer decided to switch to a yearly rate so that they would not have to market to their subscribers every month in order to keep them. While certain releases were kept as "Plus Only" features for a brief time, in many cases the Plus game rooms were simply games hosted by Mplayer's own servers. With the rapid growth of Quake fans, and the increased server load, Mplayer opened the door to the QuakeWorld network, exponentially increasing the number of available game servers, and offering someone a chance to get a faster connection to a game. The downside was that there was very little control of cheat codes in these systems. Mplayer tried to increase the appeal of the Plus subscription, offering a "secure" Mplayer owned Server hosted Game, and offering Rankings and customizable Clan Skins. With the Internet user demographic changing, a growing market emerged for classic games, with Scrabble and Battleship leading the charge. Mplayer turned more into an aggregator, hoping to attract as many users as possible with free, ad supported games and software, including Checkers, Othello, and Chess. Despite this, the company had been losing money, $11.9 million in 1998 alone, and by late 1999, had yet to break even. HearMe, the internal audio chat feature in Mplayer that was later split off, eventually accounted for 50% of all of the company's revenues.

Mplayer offered a variety of game types to play online, including fast paced action games, sports games, card and board games, amongst other types of games. Until late 1997, Mplayer had a lineup of about 20 games, with some of their more popular ones being Quake, Red Alert, Diablo, and Scrabble. In October 1997, it was announced that they would add more than 30 new games to their roster, making it the largest offering of any online gaming service at the time. The company wanted to diversify their market, and brought in many new types of games, such as Cavedog's Total Annihilation and a host of new card games to attract more casual gamers. In a deal with Sports Illustrated, Mpath introduced an entirely new section of games dedicated to sports. The new section was meant to accommodate sports gamers, as well as online tournaments and sport news and statistics. The main commercial games were divided by channels into action, strategy, sims, and role playing. Their popularity generally came down to the individual game rather than the type of game. Indeed, some games would often be too underpopulated to support matchmaking, while other more popular games would have a thriving community of hundreds or thousands of gamers. Competition of online matchmaking services for computer games had been increasing by the late 1990s. Mpath attempted to ensure that it stay up to date with the latest and most popular games being released. Some games like Quake II, Daikatana and Unreal were all heavily promoted as being available for online play even before their launch.

When Mplayer launched, there were few major online gaming services, but in the late 1990s, it had numerous competitors. Notable competitors were Heat. net (built on a licensed version of Mplayer's core technology), Total Entertainment Network, Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone (later MSN Gaming Zone), GameSpy3D, Kali, Blizzard's Battle. net, and Sierra's Won. net. Soon after, Mplayer had become a well known player in the online gaming industry. As such, most of their marketing was geared toward attracting new gamers through a broader offering of games, as well as taking advantage of the large community they already had. The former can be seen in the hype surrounding the release of high profile games of the time such as Unreal and Quake II, both of which were to be offered online through Mplayer. com. They also used their Plus service to cater to the more hardcore gamers who did not mind the extra fee. One source describes their presence at E3 2000: E 3 2000, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in May 2000, was a multimedia extravaganza. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the room sized exhibit housing Mplayer. com, the premier on line multiplayer gaming service. And, if the multimedia electronic action didn't grab your attention, the exhibit itself was sure to. Here was a mega multimedia presentation all its own. The exhibit, costing tens of thousands of dollars to design, fabricate, and install, occupied on three raised floors, where fanatic gamers battled it out on a dozen big screen overhead monitors The design and construction represented an engineering marvel. Nothing had been left to chance in the exhibit's design. By creating such an extravagant exhibit at e3, the largest gaming exposition, they sent a message that Mplayer was a major player in the gaming industry. Even at this late date, months before the buyout by GameSpy, Mpath was still aggressively marketing Mplayer. This was despite criticisms that splitting off HearMe took the company's focus away from gaming.

Service was provided through proprietary software, a channel based lobby and matchmaking client known as gizmo. The design and interface of gizmo was outsourced to two design companies, Good Dog Design and Naima Productions. Upon launching the program, users would choose from a list of games, that would then take them to a universal lobby for that game. From there, users could create their own game channel that would be displayed to everyone. They could also join a created game. The lobby would show a list of rooms, ordered from least to most latency. Green rooms indicate games that were fast enough to be playable, while red rooms were unplayable. The rocket icon indicated the game had been launched. This would bring them to a second private chatroom before entering the game. The channel creator acted as the moderator, who could launch the game and ban players in the lobby as well as change game settings, but could also make someone else a moderator. In some games like Quake, players could join the game after it was launched, but for most this was not possible.

Mpath integrated many features into Mplayer in an attempt to stay competitive and support its community. Most of these features came with an update to Gizmo in December 1997, among them were voice chat, a built in browser known as WebViewer, personal messaging, as well a ratings and rankings system for Plus members.

Despite its success in attracting users, Mplayer was still in financial trouble in late 2000, and it had been speculated the division would be sold off, possibly to Sega, owner of Heat. net. However it was announced in December 2000 that GameSpy, an Irvine based gaming site founded in 1996, made a deal to acquire Mplayer from HearMe. The two companies had fully merged by June 2001.