GOA

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

~ the obit ~

GOA was a France Telecom product at exactly the layer where distance gets decided. It was free if your line came from the right country and your games came in French boxes. Mine came from a Turkish dial-up account and a shelf of English or Turkish releases, so the whole apparatus was invisible to me even though I was playing the same titles in the same years.

It was created in March 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary and stayed one until 2004, when France Telecom folded it into the Content Division. The pitch was free matchmaking for France. Every supported game got its own chat, you made a room that appeared above the chat, and other people joined it from there.

The part worth remembering is how deep the hooks went. Most of the flagship PC titles sold in France in the early 2000s pointed the buyer at GOA, either with a logo on the back of the box or a line in the manual. Age of Empires 2 put it in the game's own menu. French Wikipedia says the only comparable integration anybody managed afterwards was Zone.com.

I had none of that. What I had was whatever the game could dial or connect to on its own, and later whatever the cafe machine already had installed. A national portal built by the national telco is a thing you either live inside or never see, and there is no middle position available from another country.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pulsar plugin ~

Everyone who signed up installed a proprietary plugin called pulsar. Its job was small and it did the one thing that made the site work: when a game room filled, pulsar launched the multiplayer section of the game on every machine in that room at once. Nobody read out an IP address and nobody waited for the slow one.

That is a lot of integration to ask for in 1999, and it is the reason publishers agreed to print the logo. The portal was not selling a lobby. It was selling the fifteen seconds between agreeing to play and actually playing, which in that era was where most of the attrition happened.

~ the camelot years ~

In 2002 GOA took the European operating license for Dark Age of Camelot and ran both the publishing and the servers, in French, Italian, Spanish, German and English. A matchmaking site had become an MMO operator, which is a different business with different obligations, and it held that job for eight years.

It later did the same for Warhammer Online, and for a while it ran League of Legends in Europe. That last one is easy to forget now. Before Riot had a European operation of its own, the game was somebody else's licensed territory, and the somebody was a subsidiary of a phone company.

~ how it emptied out ~

The end was a sequence of handbacks rather than a shutdown. On 1 December 2009 GOA said it was refocusing again and ended Warrior Epic and Kart'n Crazy while dropping Mytheon before it ever launched. Six weeks later, on 20 January 2010, Dark Age of Camelot went back to Mythic after eight years on European servers. League of Legends returned to Riot on 10 May, and Warhammer Online's European servers moved to Bioware Mythic on 6 July.

On 29 June 2010 PangYa went to Galaxy Games, and with nothing left to operate the goa.com portal disappeared during July into Orange Games. Eleven years of being the place French players started from, closed out by a series of licensing letters. The publishers had learned how to run Europe themselves, and once they could, the middle layer had nothing to sell.

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