BarrysWorld

» see barrysworld.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Between 2002 and 2005 I played a lot of Counter-Strike in internet cafes in Turkey, and every server on the list was Turkish. This was not patriotism. It was the round-trip time. A British server was somewhere between 90 and 150 milliseconds away on a good day, which in a game decided by who saw whom first is the difference between playing and being shot by someone you never rendered. BarrysWorld was one of the biggest free server networks in Europe for exactly those years and it was, from where I sat, geographically unreachable.

It started in March 1998 as a handful of clan servers that the people running them decided to open to everybody. No charge and no account to buy, just a server list with Quake and Team Fortress on it, and later Half-Life and Counter-Strike. In Britain in 1998 that was close to a public utility. Almost nobody had the upstream to host a game server at home, and the alternative was paying somebody like Wireplay for the privilege.

By the peak it had 300,000 registered users and 35 people on payroll, funded by a million pounds from 3i. The question everyone asks about free things is how it was paid for, and the answer here is the strangest part of the story.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it paid for itself ~

Around 1999 BarrysWorld started selling internet access. Not a subscription: a phone number. British dial-up at the time was billed per minute by the telephone company, and the provider took a cut of the call revenue. If you could get people to stay connected for hours you had a business without ever sending anybody an invoice.

Gamers stay connected for hours. That is the entire insight. A website that gave away game servers had accidentally assembled the most valuable customer base in the country for a business model that paid by the minute, and BarrysWorld became the fourth largest internet provider in the UK measured by call minutes per month. The free servers were the advertisement and the phone bill was the product, and for about two years the two halves fed each other perfectly.

~ the crash ~

Then British telecoms changed. Flat rate narrowband arrived, then cheap ADSL, and the per-minute call revenue that funded everything simply stopped existing. There was no way to price a customer who now paid one company a fixed sum and expected the servers to stay free. The dot-com collapse closed the door on raising money to bridge the gap, and in 2001 a company with 35 employees went into voluntary liquidation over an economics change it did not cause.

GAME, the high street video game retailer, bought the website and the servers out of it. That made a certain sense on paper. A shop that sells games gets a community of people who play them, and running some servers is cheaper than advertising. It ran the service in roughly the old shape for another couple of years.

~ the day it died ~

On 23 January 2004 GAME switched off every game server and disabled every barrysworld.com mail account on the same day, with a note about focusing online activity on core commerce. Which is the honest version of what happened. A retailer had looked at a line item that produced no measurable sales and deleted it, and there was no argument to be made against that, because the thing being deleted had never been a product in the first place.

The founders had already seen it coming. In 2003 they had restarted the community by hand on a new domain, volunteer-run again, with no phone number to sell this time. That is where the people went. The servers were gone but the actual asset had always been a few thousand people who knew each other's handles, and that part walked out before the lights went off.

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