MWEB rules online gaming
2012-10-24 15:00
Cape Town – MWEB has once again proven that it is the leading online gaming service provider in South Africa by being voted as the most popular primary ADSL ISP amongst SA gamers in a recent MyGaming Survey.
According to the survey 42.8% of those questioned indicated that MWEB is their preferred ADSL ISP.
The recent results of the MyGaming survey comes after a similar survey conducted in March 2012 where 32% of gamers voted MWEB as the most popular ISP for online gaming.
“At MWEB, we recognise the importance of gaming traffic and want to be able to deliver the very best gaming experience possible to our entire customer base. Since becoming a tier 1 ISP giving us greater control of the network traffic priority, we increased gaming traffic with the very highest assurance levels giving it priority over all other traffic,” Desmond Kurz, online gaming manager for MWEB, told News24.
Kurz said the MWEB gaming network is open to all South African gamers, the only difference is that if a gamer is already on the MWEB network, they can expect a better performance when accessing these services as less "inter-network” or peering connections will be required.
When asked that some people feel cable broadband is a dead end street because the connections are finite, Kurz said at MWEB they do not believe that cable broadband is dead, on the contrary it’s on the rise. He said mobile online games are already available in the country including some for top publishers like Electronic Arts.
According to him the online gaming industry is enormous and its growing rapidly and attracting users who were not traditionally interested in gaming.
“Online gaming has grown by 25% according to the PwC Entertainment and Media Outlook 2012 report which means that the online segment is therefore expected to grow the fastest of any category as broadband penetration continues to increase.
"According to the same report, the gaming industry in South Africa was worth over R1.2 billion in 2011 and generated sales of over 3.8 million games. So we believe that this is much more than a niche pastime.”
Kurz said with regards to online gaming trends, MWEB has seen an increase in first person shooters which have become an online pastime, and massively multiplayer in online only games. He said offline gamers are also migrating to playing online.
According to him the South African online gaming community is relatively small compared to developed nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom but it is experiencing double digit growth.”
Kurz said the games that the majority of South Africans are playing ranges from Call of Duty, Team Fortress 2, Battlefield 3, World of Warcraft, Dota 2, League of Legends, Guild Wars 2 and Minecraft.
News24 is part of 24.com, a subsidiary of Media24, which is in the Naspers stable. MWEB is a subsidiary of Naspers.
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