Heat.net

» see heat.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i learned about heat.net retroactively, years after it was already gone, reading about pre-battle.net online services in some 2010s tedium-style writeup. it was a sega thing for north american pc gamers in 1997-2000, with no presence in turkey at any layer. the dreamcast was rare here, segasoft's pc-side service was rarer, and i was twelve to fifteen during its run with no path to even a credit card to register an account. honest distance applies all the way through.

segasoft launched heat.net in april 1997 from redwood city. bernie stolar was running sega of america at the time and pushed segasoft toward pc and online gaming as the company's hedge against losing the console generation. heat.net was the consumer-facing piece. you installed the heat client and joined chat lobbies to run multiplayer quake ii or unreal tournament against ranked opponents. friend lists and private messaging were built in.

the gimmick was the degrees system. you earned a virtual currency called degrees by playing games or by completing trivia contests, with bonus accruals for viewing ads. premium members could spend degrees at heat.net's online store, the black market, on pc games or related merchandise. it was the first loyalty program of its kind for an online gaming service, and several of the design ideas (rewards for time spent plus a virtual currency redeemable for real merchandise) showed up in xbox live and steam years later in different form.

segasoft's broader business cratered in 2000. the joint venture between sega and csk had not paid back its investment, and sega was bleeding money on the dreamcast at the same time. heat.net's shutdown was announced in september 2000 and the lobbies went dark on october 31, 2000. the staff was rolled into sega.com to handle the seganet console launch.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

heat.net's pitch in 1997 was that the in-game multiplayer browsers most pc shooters shipped with were rough. matchmaking was usually a manual ip-paste affair, with no chat outside the game itself. heat.net offered a pre-game lobby with skill matchmaking and a built-in chat layer, plus rankings, all hosted by segasoft and free to join. a heat client running on a 56k modem in late 1997 was a credibly better experience than what most games shipped on their own.

heatcigl was the showcase product. segasoft sponsored a collegiate gaming league running quake iii: arena and unreal tournament tournaments across us campuses through 1999-2000. it was one of the earliest sponsored esports operations in north america, predating major league gaming by several years. the league died with the service.

~ the fall ~

the degrees system attracted abuse almost immediately. users figured out they could log in and leave the client running while doing something else, accumulating degrees without actually playing. segasoft tried to engineer around the abuse but the underlying problem was that the loyalty mechanic rewarded presence rather than engagement, and presence is cheap to fake. by 1999 the active-versus-registered ratio looked bad in the metrics that mattered.

gamespy launched in 1999 as a free server-browser plus arcade-style lobby and started eating heat.net's audience without charging for any of it. heat.net's premium tier became hard to justify when free alternatives offered most of the same matchmaking. by mid-2000 segasoft had lost the funding to keep the lights on and the hardware to keep them on with.

~ what came after ~

cnet ran a 2008 piece naming heat.net as one of the greatest defunct websites in history. the recognition was about ideas more than scale. heat.net's earned-currency loyalty design and its lobby-as-social-product approach both later showed up in the modern online gaming infrastructure that microsoft and valve built, and the sponsored-collegiate-league model became its own multimillion-dollar industry. nobody credited segasoft. the playbook just worked.

heat.net's shutdown also coincided with sega exiting the console hardware business a few months later, in early 2001. segasoft had been the company's pc-side bet and its online-gaming bet at once. when both bets stopped paying, segasoft was the first piece sega cut loose, then the dreamcast went next.

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