Aviation and sport get off the ground

Despite sports-mad Australia having a strong market for sports games and flight combat simulators, this popularity does not appear to be reflected in the numbers of people playing online. The main exception within this category is racing games, which enjoy reasonable levels of popularity. However, even this is due to strong grassroots support among users, rather than ISPs or game publishers.Why is the case? There are two main reasons. First, the actual networking and multiplayer code of the titles themselves is substandard compared to the other genres mentioned previously. Flight combat simulations, car racing games, team games and virtually all sports games require split-second reflexes and immediate responses. Obviously, a slow Net connection goes a long way to rendering such games unplayable. Some online racing leagues do offer compromises such as indestructible vehicles due to the tendency for even the most serious of online races to become something akin to Deathrace 2000, but this type of compromise tends to drive away the purists. The lack of support on the part of larger ISPs to run such servers is also a major issue. Its a difficult argument to justify running a dedicated racing game server - you can use valuable bandwidth and PC resources to offer a popular FPS server, or take a risk on running a racing game server that may not be used often at all, and with substandard multiplayer code to boot.