DWANGO Closes Shop

The DWANGO servers are coming down - at least in the US. So says DWANGO's CEO Bob Huntley who delivered the news to gamers and the industry via a Monday-morning story in the Houston Chronicle. In the US, DWANGO operated 28 dial-up servers that delivered lag-free, fee-based gaming. Some of the DWANGO titles available for the US$7.95/month fee included Quake II, Total Annihilation, and Final Doom.

Rumored to be on shaky ground for about a week, Huntley was able to put a bit of a philosopher's spin on the news. "We built it, and they didn't come," said Huntley, the cofounder and CEO of DWANGO, in today's Houston Chronicle. "It's not a reflection on the technology or the idea, but we just didn't have the capital to build a market," he continued.

Huntley told GameSpot News this morning that "it was a matter of investors deciding at the last minute" to pull their resources. "This is very sudden," Huntley said.

Twenty-eight US-based servers would be silenced in the very near future, and the 25 full-time DWANGO staffers in Houston and Shreveport, La., would be laid off.

Acknowledging that DWANGO was at one time a trend-setter - "we had something to do with breaking this market open" - when DWANGO was established, Huntley said, "They're stuck with the Net now." DWANGO's dial-up gaming technology avoided certain bottlenecks experienced by Web-based gaming, but the technology obviously wasn't enough to impress the venture capital money supporting DWANGO.

Launched in late 1994, the Dial-up Wide Area Network Game Operation was initially popular with hard-core DOOM players, who could dial local DWANGO servers and play multiplayer games with virtually no latency. Unfortunately for DWANGO, its launch was mere months before the Internet started its explosive growth, and the majority of today's action gamers were content to put up with Internet latency rather than pay hourly fees to play on DWANGO.

And to think that news out of DWANGO wasn't all that bad recently: The company's Japanese presence was named as a Dreamcast partner of Sega of Japan - it will provide an online assist with the new console's online game playing profile. Huntley said he could see the continued operation of subsidiary DWANGO Japan as someday being the catalyst of a reborn DWANGO in the States, but "there's not much more hope than that."

A deal with Microsoft was struck last year creating DWANGO-Zone, which would automatically connect Internet Gaming Zone users to the service when they wanted to play Age of Empires, Flight Sim 98, CART Precision Racing, or Monster Truck Madness, without the latency inherent in Internet play. But apparently that deal was too little, too late.

In addition to DWANGO's Japanese operation, DWANGO licensees in Korea and Singapore are maintaining their operations for the time being.

Smoke was first seen coming from DWANGO in early August when its relationship with public relations firm Bender, Goldman & Helper was put on indefinite hold by DWANGO brass. Today, the smoke cleared - and not much was left of DWANGO.

DWANGO told GameSpot News today that gamers had not been charged for DWANGO play during the months of September or October, so there's little concern for refunds.