ZoneJeuX

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

~ the last words ~

In 2002 Counter-Strike in Turkey meant an internet cafe, a LAN and whoever else happened to be in the room. ZoneJeuX was the same game in the same years, except it was played over the internet by French speakers who had a free server list to pick from. I had neither the connection for that nor the language, so this one is reconstructed out of French records rather than remembered.

It opened on 5 November 1999, built in six months by a team of fifteen at Infosources, a subsidiary of Belgacom. The idea was a free network gaming service with a community bolted to it: server browsers, ladders, clan pages, forums, and a second half made of card and board games for people who did not own a shooter. Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament and Age of Empires on one side. Chess, checkers, backgammon, reversi and belote on the other.

The growth curve was the sort the period produced. Over 100,000 members by February 2000, when Infogrames took half the company. Half a million by November. Six hundred thousand registered users by March 2001. In September 2001 it was the sixteenth most visited French website of any kind, with 951,732 unique visitors in the month, and by February 2002 it was the fourth largest French gaming site on 156,000 uniques. Ownership had by then passed to IXO Publishing, formed out of a merger between Belgacom's Skynet services and Infosources.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

The audience was never the problem. Revenue for 2000 came in at 0.3 million euros against a projection of 0.8 million, and the gap never closed. Advertising was the entire model, and French display advertising collapsed along with everyone else's after the bubble went. By late 2002 advertising covered fifteen percent of what the service cost to run.

In December 2002 ZoneJeuX started charging. For a service whose whole proposition was that the servers were free, that was less a pivot than an announcement. IXO had put 10.6 million euros into the site since 1999 and could not find the revenue to justify another year of it.

~ the filing ~

IXO filed, and the liquidation judiciaire was pronounced on 20 May 2003. That is the death of ZoneJeuX proper, three and a half years after launch, with the French gaming web's largest community folded into a court filing alongside its servers.

~ what came after ~

The name did not stay buried. Rentabiliweb had taken a 55 percent stake in 2004, and in 2005 a company called Luditech brought ZoneJeuX back as a casual gaming site. By May 2005 it was claiming 1.8 million registrations since 1999 and an audience that was 55 percent women, which is a very long way from clan ladders and weapon stats.

You can see both eras sitting on the same domain in the Internet Archive's file listing. There is a directory of Counter-Strike weapon icons from the clan pages, AK47 and AWP and USP rendered as little GIFs, and a few folders over there is a set of thumbnails for belote, coinche, dames and backgammon. Same address, two completely different rooms. Today zonejeux.com refuses the connection outright.

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