One thing that gamers rarely pay much attention to is the news, or at least news that does not deal directly with gaming itself and almost never to politics. But the fact is that unless you are playing a single player game any decisions that affects traffic or speeds on the internet naturally affects all gamers. But if you have not been paying attention during the last few weeks the new FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, an ex-executive at Comcast, has decided to bypass Congress and the people and pass new regulations that effectively end internet neutrality.
“Net Neutrality” simply means that content providers will not be forced to “pay to play” if they want to access online resources. Internet Service Providers are now allowed to charge websites who use more bandwidth, such as gaming or streaming sites, more money based on the amount of bandwidth that they use. The question here however is what exactly does that mean to gamers, both in the short and long runs.
The end of free-to-play games?
First of all the effect will not be immediate. The first gamers to suffer are the ones who play extremely graphical games such as Lord of the Rings Online or World of War craft on their “free to play” servers. These games use up quite a bit of bandwidth and will be one of the first industries affected and free to play may soon be a thing of the past and soon to follow will be increased subscription fees for multiplayer games. But the hardest hit will be games not owned by large corporations like Sony.
But increases in price and restrictions on free playing areas will not be the only effect. Over time smaller gaming platforms will be priced out of the market, leaving only the large companies to provide games. This means less competition and far less innovation in new games and gaming systems. Content can, and most likely will, be controlled by a relatively small group of people, all of whom have a profit motive that dwells far above their desire for quality. If quality does not increase profit then it is not going to happen. When the choice becomes narrower still it will make it easy to outside monitoring of gaming, including voice chats. We are seeing this already as the government is claiming to be looking for terrorists in World of Warcraft.
The one hope that this can be stopped before it does too much damage is that currently it is only FCC policy and not law. We all need to understand what having a free and open internet means to all of us. Gamers spend large parts of their weeks in-game, something that will become harder and harder as control is lost to corporate greed. Because most of the largest ISP’s are located in the United States a decision like this will not only affect US internet users but users around the world.
