iGame is one of SA’s most established gaming service providers, and has made a name for itself by hosting quality game servers for numerous online PC games. We recently got a chance to catch up with iGame’s big cheese, Johnathan Smit, also known as Xerowing in local online gaming environs.

Smit gave us a frank account of the current state of local online gaming, sharing insights into growth in the industry, and some hilarious examples of actual excuses provided by people for being banned on iGame servers.

MyGaming: What are the most popular online games in SA, based on your experience?

Johnathan Smit: Call of Duty 4, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Call of Duty Black Ops, Heroes of Newerth

I’ve also seen large amounts of players over Xfire playing Solitaire, although I don’t know who hosts the servers for that 😛

MyGaming: What are some of the biggest challenges to running a gaming service provider?

Johnathan Smit: The biggest single challenge is dealing with a consistently changing local ISP landscape.

Sudden changes in routing from another ISP can have severe impacts on not only server population but also individual player experience.
To a certain extent there is still a very large segment of the gaming population that seems to think that the internet lives inside their routers – if the light is on, the internet is operational. This poses a unique problem in dealing with issues resulting from other, external and often uncooperative ISP’s.

Dealing with problems relating to failures across a countrywide dynamic system on an hourly basis is what we at iGame spend most of our time dealing with purely because we do provide support to end users even when the issue is not related to iGame.

Second to that, trying to maintain a certain level of user experience  by enforcing limits on what players can and cannot do online while constantly having active resistance to the entire concept of self-control is always challenging.

Of course there are the lighter points of dealing with the recently banned or suspended. Through iGame I have personally dealt with a large number of players all with unique variables in their suspension, but all with the same basic premise to their story.

These include:

“I am innocent.”

“It was a Friend/Cousin/Younger Brother/Parental Unit.”

“I was away from home and PC must have joined by accident.”

“Someone stole my key and used my exact config online.”

“Someone stole my wallet and inside was a picture of my pc, which lead to it being hacked.”

“My name is not offensive to anyone but you.”

“I call my mother that.”

The list goes on.

And then the random threats from 12 year olds of “taking” down enterprise level networks by hacking into notepad etc.
So I do on occasion get the opportunity to sit back and have a good laugh.

MyGaming:  We know you are launching Crysis 2 servers, do you have anything else interesting in the pipeline?

Johnathan Smit: We are focusing on Crysis 2 and Homefront at the moment

Although we do have plans for multiple leagues over the coming months and a few rather interesting side projects

MyGaming: Would there be scope for iGame to expand into console gaming, or does the PS3 and Xbox 360 being closed systems prevent this?

Johnathan Smit: We have been toying with the idea of setting up some test instances of console based services although the P2P nature of console gaming doesn’t allow for truly dedicated console servers.

Also one of the main reasons I have personally been looking at hosting some Xbox events is purely to see if Azi can back up her incessant trash talking 😛

MyGaming:  Do you think gaming in SA is growing?

Johnathan: Gaming is definitely growing, although that growth might not be in the areas anyone expects it.

Casual gaming is growing locally at an exponential rate, as is console gaming.

PC gaming IS growing although at a slower pace than the previous two sectors.

This is predominantly due to the fact that no one has released a new version of Counterstrike Source 6.0 FORREALZ or CoD 4 LOCALONLY yet PC gaming growth can be directly correlated back to the frequency of new releases, while this market sector remains just as fickle as always it still shows significant growth with each new release, although with the frequency of new titles coming to market we do see a decline in numbers in certain older titles.