Games - GameRanger

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	Games - GameRanger

GameRanger is an Internet gaming service for the Apple Macintosh computing platform. The service includes custom software and unlike other gaming services is not strictly web-based. GameRanger was created by Scott Kevill, an Australian programmer, and is currently at version 4.5. The service was first released in July 1999 with support for 11 game titles. In the same year, it achieved an award of "Best Internet Gaming Achievement" by Macworld Magazine. The service today supports over 150 titles.

In its early days, the service provided an Internet tracker for a range of Mac games at a time when developing and maintaining custom Internet trackers and tracker software was seen as financially unattractive (as a far smaller percentage of gamers had the bandwidth to support Internet gaming). Some games of the time had support for Internet gaming through their use of Apple's NetSprockets but no tracking software. At one time, a handful of games such as Total Annihilation used NetSprockets as an alternative to DirectPlay. The result was that users of these games could only play amongst other users using the same computing platform. Hence GameRanger proved valuable for this niche market.

Today the service acts as a generic Internet tracker and gaming community for Mac games offering special services such as rankings, buddy lists and in-game voice communication. However it must now compete with the vast majority of developers who are chosing to adopt custom tracking software and maintain their own trackers. NetSprockets now belongs to an open source project called OpenPlay that has experienced very limited success in its adoption. Changes in networking technology as well as market expectations have also largely eliminated games that do not allow cross-platform network play. Nevertheless, GameRanger continues to support a range of cross-platform games including those with custom trackers.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for GameRanger ]

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