Game(Rail) Over

The folks at GameRail turned off the lights last month, ending an innovative experiment that promised to drop your ping and thus give you the extra milliseconds needed to blast the everliving snot out of those Counter-terrorist weasels.

GameRail sent waves of buzz throughout the gaming community upon its launch in 2006, but failed to deliver on the hype or broaden its customer base. Based out of St. Louis, Mo, GameRail aimed to connect gamers directly with thousands of servers via their ISP, cutting out that massive middleman known colloquially as “the internet.” It was a fantastic idea, provided you were willing to shell out $11.99 a month for the privilege. And you lived in one of the eight U.S. cities in which the service was available. And you happened to use an ISP they’d partnered with. And you did all your gaming on a PC. And you weren’t one of the millions of casual and MMO gamers to whom latency’s not a huge concern. And users who met all those criteria? Even they reported mixed results.

GameRail is the latest in a long line of companies to learn the hard way that to make it in the gaming industry these days you’ll need to have appeal beyond the hardcore Bawls-swilling, LAN-party crowd. There are only so many ultra-competitive FPS maniacs with top systems and ubersensitive mice who are willing to pay a premium to get even a 35-millisecond jump on the competition. I dig Counterstrike just as much as the next dude, but there’s no way even I can delude myself into thinking that the whopping one-tenth of a second GameRail might get me in ideal conditions would suddenly launch me to the top of the gaming universe, or even to the top of the server.

Back in the dark ages of dial-up and fledgling highspeed, more than a few gamers would have been happy to invest in anything that would dim the mind-numbing lag that seemed to plague just about any online experience. Today, with almost-universal high-speed access, even a clever new startup with promising organization and hardware isn’t able to outrun the law of diminishing returns. The market’s invisible hand has made its decision, and it’s giving GameRail a thumbs-down: with connections as speedy as they are, those extra milliseconds just aren’t worth it.