"My name is Ramon “Xie” Plaisier. I’m the Community Manager and Head of Marketing for Interactive 3D. I’ve played counter-strike: Source on a professional level for quite some time. Before that I was a top 10 player on Aliens vs. Predator (for the people that actually remember Mplayer and AvP).

Apart from gaming I’m also a visual artist. I’m currently redoing most of the websites present in the i3D.net network and working on some new projects."

"I personally think i3D.net is such a successful company because we know what gamers want and need. Most of our employees are (or were) all big into games. We’re not a bunch of 50 year old men who have no idea how the game industry and gamers think.

We listen to our customers, if the people want it; we do our best to get it for them.

Of course using top of the line Dell hardware and some of the fastest networks available in Europe ensures that gamers playing on our servers don’t have to worry about things like lag or unstable pings. By providing a quality product we make sure people come back and remember the name Interactive 3D.

Publishers also notice us a reliable, high quality host. We’re the only Activision Authorized host in The Netherlands. At the same time we’re also a trusted partner of Electronic Arts. This results in some unique partnership at times where we can help big publishers with just that little bit of extra quality that they need.

Asides from the previously mentioned points we’re not afraid to try new things. We were the first company to offer dedicated hosting for the Microsoft Xbox 360 (with the Frontlines: Fuel of War beta)."

"Having a history in game design myself it’s hard to look at the industry solely from a gamer point of view.

From a technical viewpoint I think the introduction of multicore processors is awesome. It really opens up a new world of opportunities for developers. Entire cores dedicated to specific systems within a game (AI, physics calculations, lighting calculations etc.) will make the next generation of games a truly amazing thing to behold. The possibilities are slowly becoming unlimited.

From the point of view as a gamer and gaming in general though I’d have to say it’s good to be a gamer these days. We’ve seen an huge amount of excellent games come by the past year. With games like Unreal Tournament, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 all being released in the month, it’s hard having to pick just one from all of them. The advantage is that we see many great clans emerging throughout those games. The large selection of quality games ensure that we don’t see all top players focusing on a single game while the other games are neglected. This provides for much more interesting competitions overall.

As far as gaming communities go, there’s a steady increase of “professional” communities. Both looking at sponsored clans that have a big following of fans and emerging network sites. People are quickly realizing that gamers aren’t just the 15 year old boys, staying up till late at night to play their favorite. With the average age of a gamer being around 27, companies are starting to realize the potential of investing into and being involved in the game industry. In my opinion this is a good development, especially, for people desiring a career as a professional gamer."

"Pc gaming is in fact more popular here than it is in the United States. We get more and more requests for servers every day and it’s obvious that the game industry is growing rapidly in Europe. With over 600 top of the line Intel quadcore servers spread out over datacenters in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and London we have a large portion of Europe covered and can ensure good, quality hosting for nearly any country in Europe. Still we have to keep adding new servers to keep up with the demand. This just helps to show how big the European market is becoming and how serious many people are about playing their favorite game.

As for the market in the United States, well you can consider this an exclusive. This week we started placing the first servers in datacenters in Texas and New York so we’re also moving towards the market in the States. Cups and league in the States are a bit bigger then they are here right now. This is largely due to the massive interest from sponsors for such events. As soon as the European market gets more interest from sponsors I’m sure we’ll see a rapid increase in good, well organized cups soon enough. It’s certainly not due to a lack of quality, highly skilled players and clans.

As for the Asian market, well that’s a completely different story. The Asian market is really different from the Western market. The kind of games that appeal to Asian players are generally different than the games that appeal to western audiences. In Asia games like (MMO)RPG’s and Strategy games are really big (Korea has a Starcraft channel on tv for instance). It’s really hard to break into this market and it’s not something we are currently focusing on."

"Well there are a few different reasons. First of course it’s a way for us to do something fun for our community and customers. By offering some nice prizes to cup winners we can give something back to the people who have supported us for years. Asides from this it’s also a way for us to get our own name more known. More important though, we want to show others that events like this benefit the gaming community as a whole. Current amateur clans have the chance of proving themselves against existing clans and might end up breaking into the professional ranks of gaming."

"It’s obviously nice to be able to branch out into different markets. By having a broader list of clients we can improve our own services. We’re seeing more and more demand for services that go beyond just providing a server. For instance the company Simbin the developer of the Race 07 game we’ll be providing onsite support for their racing league all over Europe, we’ll actually fly to each and every race event to support Simbin with our gaming services. We helped a number of game developers with a unique hosting service during the beta. Quake Wars from SplashDamage / Activision and Frontlines: Fuel of War from Kaos / THQ are both games we've hosted exclusive in Europe.

It’s fun to work with these kinds of clients, their needs and demands are very different from that of the average client. There’s definitely a challenge in working with big companies. But it’s something we thoroughly enjoy doing.

We have some more fun projects coming up including a very cool project with the Dutch army in Afghanistan! ;-)"

Posted by Dwayne "Insecure"

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