Gamerail

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GameRail Corp (A Delaware Corporation)

Type	Private
Founded	2006
Headquarters	St.Louis, MO, U.S.
Key people	Mark Senda CEO
Industry	Online Gaming, Telecom Service
Products	Private Gaming Network
Employees	17
Website	www.GameRail.com (No longer up)

GameRail was a private network designed to improve the performance of online gaming. Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, GameRail used its heavily peered, geographically distributed network gateways in combination with various Internet Service Providers (ISP) in an attempt to reduce latency (network delay ,“lag” or “ping”), packet loss, and jitter (delay variation) in online games.

GameRail seeks to act as a bridge between ISPs and game servers. A client application is used to reroute gaming traffic away from an ISP’s typical connection through the Internet and instead onto GameRail’s private network, where it is routed directly to the desired game server. This approach tries to provide a customer with the shortest and fastest connection possible.

In Summer 2007, 10,000 First Person Shooter (FPS) and Real Time Strategy (RTS) servers were peered with the GameRail network. GameRail suggests that with peering up to 34 million homes with broadband connections in the U.S. and Canada could use the service. GameRail initially targeted FPS/RTS games such as Counter-Strike, America’s Army, Quake, and ETQW and Massively Multiplayer Online Games(MMOGS) beginning with Fury because of their appreciation for a high quality, low latency connection. Support for console games is under development.

As of April 18, 2008 the network has been shutdown. "It is with deep regret to announce that the GameRail network has been discontinued at this time. Thank you to the gamers who have participated in the GameRail trial and support of its development as we worked to solve the issues of latency and network quality and their impact on gaming. We believe that latency and network quality will continue to affect the gaming experience and while we are still believers in the GameRail concept, the market does not appear to be ready to support a standalone network for gaming at this time."

[edit] User Experience

GameRail has gone through several releases of their desktop client with mixed success. There has been much controversy over whether the product actually works (examples like this GotFrag Thread) and is seemingly hit-and-miss for most users even in forums that they promote such as this. While some users have experienced improvement, many have seen either no improvement or higher latencies. While "in theory" the product should work, reality suggests that the problem of Internet latency in the United States is inordinately complex and likely to be insurmountable for a 3rd Party to resolve. With this product, there can be no guarantees.

For games such as MMOs, many users don't appear to need the services as many are latency-resistant (such as World of Warcraft).

With no real endorsement of the product by their target demographic (e.g. professional gamers) and no reviews of the product either online or in print media, the product lacks legitimacy.