The first rise of online multiplayer began on PC in the late 1990s with the launch of Ultima Online and EverQuest, two fundamental MMORPGs. EverQuest, which was particularly influential, is a team-based fantasy game inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and old-school text-based role-playing games; online players form guilds to embark on raids, missions and other explorations. Popular console role-playing games, such as Final Fantasy, were decidedly solitary games. Final Fantasy XI, the first MMORPG in the Final Fantasy series, which was released for PlayStation 2 and PC in May 2002, “began when the top management of the development team became obsessed with EverQuest,” says Naoki Yoshida, the director of the aforementioned Final Fantasy XIV.
Although The Sims Online was a relative failure when it was released in late 2002, Second Life became a resounding success soon after its release in 2003. The designers of Ultima Online were the first to observe this phenomenon when a castle from their game world sold for several thousand dollars on the online auction site eBay. Subsequently, the use of online games began to proliferate in the 90s, as a result of the widespread adoption of the Internet. Facebook's most successful games, such as Zynga's Mafia Wars (200) and Farmville (200) and EA's The Sims Social (201), maximized revenue by rewarding players for interacting with advertising partners and selling game money. Another problem game publishers have faced is the rise of secondary economies outside their worlds of game.
As the number of players continues to grow, it's clear that the technological possibilities of online gaming are endless. A couple of years ago, the popular YouTube video game creator The Act Man published a video retrospective entitled “Xbox 360 Chat Was WILD”, which shows a fairly effective montage of all the calumnies and epithets that I would rather not publish on this website. In this sense, the enduring business model of sports games seems quite outdated and is a sign of how much the production and culture of multiplayer video games have changed in the decades since the launch of some of these series. Sony took over the secondary market when it launched Station Exchange, a service designed to make it easier to buy and sell virtual products in its EverQuest games.
With 325 million copies sold worldwide, FIFA has become the best-selling sports game franchise on the planet. With the 5G era rapidly approaching, these pocket video consoles could transform online gaming and make the industry even more exciting. Halo 2 had a network code suitable for the time, decent enough to support a wide player base in online matchmaking. The growth of these early games was relatively slow but steady, with the exception of Lineage, whose explosive popularity was primarily due to the early and widespread availability of high-speed Internet connections in South Korea.
Soccer was initially launched online in August 2002 with the release of Madden NFL 2003, a cross-platform breakthrough that attracted a large segment of casual players. It now faces an uncertain landscape, as major e-sports organizers, such as Activision and Riot Games, and media partners, such as YouTube and Twitch, struggle to generate revenues that are accessible to live sports. Halo 2 was, by far, the best-selling game on the original Xbox and was a spectacular breakthrough in online matchmaking.
