Bots!!

~ the last words ~

In 2006 the thing I understood about multiplayer was that you paid for the seat, not for the game. Counter-Strike in a Turkish internet cafe was priced by the hour, and everyone in that room had the same gun as everyone else. Bots!! belonged to the model that replaced all of it, where the client costs nothing and the advantage is what is on sale, and I never crossed over to the other side of that transition.

The game came out of N-Log Soft, a Korean studio, and ran at home under the name Bout. Acclaim Games picked it up for the western market and gave it a full release in November 2006 with two exclamation marks bolted onto the title. You played a small robot fighting computer viruses. It was closer to an arena fighting game with a lobby attached than to anything an MMO usually means, and it was free.

Free was the whole argument in 2006, and it was still novel enough in the West that publishers talked about it as a business model rather than as the default. You earned an in-game currency called gigas by playing. You bought a second currency called coins with actual money, and coins got you the items that gigas took much longer to reach. Every free-to-play economy since has been a variation on that arrangement.

It found an audience fast. One million registered players by May 2007, on a title that had been out for six months from a publisher nobody had heard of yet under a name everybody had. That last part is worth sitting with, because the name was the only asset in the building that had been bought secondhand.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

Acclaim Entertainment went bankrupt in 2004. In September of that year Howard Marks bought the Acclaim name out of the wreckage for a reported hundred thousand dollars, and on 6 January 2006 he and Neil Malhotra started a new company around it. Acclaim Games was not the old Acclaim in any sense that mattered. It was a free-to-play publisher wearing a console-era logo, and Bots!! was the first thing it shipped.

The strategy worked for a while. By December 2007 the company was reporting fifteen million registered accounts across its catalog against five hundred thousand active players, which is a ratio that tells you exactly what free registration is worth. Fourteen titles went out under that logo before the end.

~ what you actually did in it ~

Sector Battle put a team of up to eight players against computer viruses across ninety five levels, and Player Battle dropped the same eight into an arena for ten minutes with nobody on their side. Base Battle was the closest the game had to a team objective, two squads of four trying to take down the other side's base.

None of that was new in Korea, where this shape of game had been ordinary for years already. What was unusual was seeing it published in English by a company with an old cartridge-era name on the box, at a moment when the Western industry was still mostly selling boxes.

~ the day it died ~

Playdom bought Acclaim Games on 18 May 2010. Playdom made Facebook games, and browser games with no client to download were the thing money was chasing that year. In July, Disney bought Playdom for 763 million dollars, which meant the decision about what to do with a Korean client-side robot MMO was now being taken several levels above anyone who cared about it.

The answer arrived quickly. Playdom closed Acclaim Games on 26 August 2010 and the servers came down on 27 August, taking the whole catalog with them rather than just the weak parts. A studio called Zylong Gaming republished the game in April 2012 under the name BoutCheetah, which ran for a few years. Both of its domains now return nothing at all, so the revival is as dead as the thing it revived.

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