With the set-top console market quite obviously moving towards the role of a home entertainment centre, capable of playing both CD's, MP3 files and DVD's, there only remains one area not yet fully exploited by the major players, on-line gaming. This sector, largely dominated by Personal Computer (PC) access until now, is going to be the area for fierce turf battles between console manufactures, games creators, Telecoms operators and anyone else who thinks they have a winning game plan.

As mentioned above, only Sega's consoles come equipped with modems and it has met with only limited success, due largely to the fact that the Dreamcast console has not sold particularly well. This will change as the console makers go for bandwidth access.

It may not be exactly the same market however. Studies have shown that online gamers tend to be older, more sophisticated and extremely varied in their game playing tastes.

Quiz games, on-line gambling, board games like Scrabble, the variety is astonishing. There is also the phenomenon of the on-line game-playing communities, interacting in virtual worlds. Such worlds like Everquest (Sony) and Asheron's Call (Microsoft) evolve against an enormous virtual canvas requiring a long apprenticeship before one can fully understand the environment. This is a far cry from the average console game.

On-line gaming is being viewed as a potentially lucrative source of income by a number of different operators and a great deal of consolidation has taken place in 2000, with websites gearing themselves to offer facilities and value added services, to entice players to stay logged on.

A good example is Gameloft, a venture backed by video game experts Ubi Soft, and hardware accessories company, Guillemot. Other sites include www.goa.com from France Telecom and the recent acquisition of Hasbro by Infogrames means that games.com will have a formidable games base on hand.

With the market as fluid as it is, how soon will it be before an on-line game of console operators battle it out for world domination??

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