Eidos president: “Broadband limitations are holding us back”

October 20, 2012

Eidos president Ian Livingstone has said that the poor broadband offerings for gamers are holding back development.

This is something we can all relate to here in SA, where ADSL speeds are a lot worse than our American, Asian and European counterparts. Often we’ve lamented that as SA gamers we are getting left behind in game development by our broadband limitations, as 2GB patches and digital distribution becomes the norm. However, it would appear that even the high-speed connections of first-world nations aren’t good enough for the direction in which the industry wants to go.

Livingstone criticised ISPs capabilities at the Broadband World Forum in Amsterdam this week.

″What we need is super-speed broadband,” Livingstone said, adding, ″You’re kind of holding us back in many respects.″

Livingstone noted that as games now provide ongoing services as opposed to a single packaged product, the demands on broadband networks are greater than ever. He also said that online games should optimally be played with a latency of below 40 milliseconds, something South Africans can’t dream of on European servers.

To illustrate his point, Livingstone used the metaphor of London’s 1860s sewer system. Instead of simply building to handle the capacity, the designers chose to create sewers that could handle six times the expected, err, load.

″The message is: build bigger pipes and we’ll try not to fill them,″ Livingstone said. ″ISPs, please do not rest on your laurels.″

There’re a lot of jokes to be drawn from this analogy, but MyGaming is a family website.