TeliaSonera's Vlad Ihora
The carrier's games man talks Blizzard, Turkey and why OnLive is too soon for the mass market
As the games business turns increasingly to the online space, so the matter of the ever-changing connectivity landscape becomes more important.
We caught up with Vlad Ihora, the head of games at TeliaSonera - the company that handles the networking for Blizzard in Europe, among others - to find out how the online environment had changed in the past year, plus what the chances of success were for OnLive.
Aside from the commercial perspective, which has been very good for us - even under the crisis period - we've added more customers like Activision Demonware. We've started a very nice co-operation with them in New York, and now we're expanding further in the types of services with them.
Specifically we're supporting quite a lot of their servers that have game stats for players, in some of the most successful games, like Modern Warfare 2 - which is one of our favourites, and has been doing pretty well...
It's linked very well with the relationship with Blizzard, because it's part of the same family. That helps a lot - by having a very good co-operation with such a relevant company that also allies itself with such a giant as Activision, which wants to learn from that good online experience that Blizzard has had...
It's the same stuff. From a technical perspective our network is the same wherever you go - US, Europe or Asia. But it's not about the technical part, it's how well known we are outside the European arena. In the US, the reason why we're a tier one network overall is because we have our own network, and we've linked it with the one in Europe, we have the same quality, and everything else.
From a commercial perspective we have a focused team in the US, we're actually pushing quite a lot more effort into the US business development side. Demonware is a US opportunity with a US platform - not an insignificant one - and we're seeing quite a different attitude towards setting up new platforms, compared to to Europe.
I think our strong point is that we can serve our customers the same way - be they in the US or Europe, they get the same sort of quality and people. We have, for example, US companies that are working with us on platforms in Europe, and vice versa. But yes - it's a market that's quite different from a cultural perspective then Europe.
It helps immensely. Their approach to their games isn't French-focused - it's globally-focused, so they have tonnes of people from Brazil playing a game on a platform which is in Paris. I'm not going to flog the quality of the network, but that gives you an idea of how good it is.
Why does it work? Well, in our case the connectivity to South America is based on private peering, so their game allows... it's not the sort of delay you could have in a first-person shooter, because it's slightly different in terms of design - but it still depends quite a lot on the overall end-to-end quality, and that happens fine.
For them it was very important to consider whether they should put a new site in the US, or pass all the traffic through existing links. I think it might come, as they're an expanding company, and they're looking at Asia as well - currently Asia also runs via Paris - and I think we'd most likely end up setting up small satellite platforms to allow further expansion into these new geographical regions.
But it definitely helps that it's not just that we can give them a European network, but also global coverage - that's incredibly useful. And for other companies in general, the question of how to approach other regions... some companies would just come in and say: "Yes, just spread your servers everywhere!" But that's not always the best course - you just have to look at the best location, and how the technical setting can work to get the same quality everywhere. It's very much game dependent.
Absolutely - Europe has grown in general. Some people would say that a crisis helps gaming, because people stay at home, but there's been a constant growth in the normal regions, such as the UK, France, Germany and Italy. Spain has also grown a lot - but specifically Turkey has been an interesting success story.
We've had a lot of companies set up in the social gaming scene - the types of games that work there aren't necessarily the subscription-based models or first person shooters, but more like casual and social gaming, microtransactions, and so on.
They've got some very interesting ways of charging people via premium SMS systems - not so much on credit or debit cards, but pretty much anything else goes. The question is how on Earth to get into Turkey from a network perspective, because sometimes we have customers come to us telling us they tried... but they traced the traffic and it was going via the US - regardless of how basic the game becomes, it's still a bit of an issue.
That helped in our case, because of our direct connectivity to Turkey - we ended up developing connections from Germany and Austria, directly into that country.