Up with "Doom"

"Doom 3" is now in stores, and if you've peeled yourself away from the blood-spattering long enough to read this--and you're in the telco industry--I have one simple question: Why are you not making money off this game?

If "Doom 3" sounds like a computer virus to you, here's a quick primer. "Doom" is among the best-selling videogame titles of all time. It's a first-person shooter game in which the object is to kill everything in sight. Most players spend hours playing it against each other on servers set up by various companies. It's ultra-graphic, ultra-violent and fattens the wallets of everyone along the way--except the telecom carriers that connect users to servers.

Over the last several weeks in this space, I have been ticking off a number of services that telcos can provide as part of a video package that would differentiate them from cable operators. Gaming didn't make the original list, only because it's not really a pure video service. But of all the potentially big and profitable services in the market, gaming must be at the top.

Consider the following numbers: Activision, which publishes "Doom," has shipped more than five million units of its "Shrek 2" and "Spider-Man 2" games combined since the beginning of the year. Pre-sales alone of "Doom 3" already put it on course to surpass sales of previous editions of "Doom," which have generated earnings of more than $100 million for its creator id Software over the past 10 years. And last year's version of "John Madden Football" (by far the most popular sports-oriented videogame), which launched in August of 2003, out-grossed every single movie released that month, generating $240 million in total sales in the calendar year.

Carriers have the capability to take part of the pie because of their ability to add significant upstream capacity. Gamers care almost as much about getting maximum upstream bandwidth as they do about graphic clarity. When Comcast pushed its maximum download speed up to 4 Mb/s, it left the upstream alone at a mere 384 kb/s. With current symmetric technology on the market, DSL providers literally could blow away such services and endear themselves to a market that has proven it's willing to part with cash as fast as it's willing to create virtual mayhem.

E-mail me at vvittore@primediabusiness.com