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Forget stalking opponents through dungeon-like environments and trying to kill them with high-powered weapons. How about a genteel game of online checkers? Until recently the majority of online gamers were males aged 15-35 who engage in "death matching," slang for online dueling with opponents in popular U.S.-made games such as Quake and Half-Life. But if projections are right, hard-core gamers who live to kill online opponents will be keeping company on the Net with a wider pool of the population, including card-playing couch potatoes and beer-bellied bingo devotees.

Bingo? Yep. Uproar.com, an online entertainment and games provider founded in 1991 in Budapest, has 100,000 registered users. Its most popular game, Bingo Blitz, attracts as many as 1,500 people per game and they do a boom lunchtime trade. By 2002 tech consultancy Datamonitor predicts there will be 5.1 million online gamers in Europe. The U.S. will have about double that figure, generating global revenues of about 1.4 billion dollars from subscription charges, advertising and e-commerce. The Web offers lots of advantages over playing solitaire. The global nature of the network means that even at 3 a.m., there will always be an available online opponent. Social interaction is a big draw since online games allow players to be a part of virtual communities, meeting new people and chatting with opponents before, during and after a match.

And playing against humans is more unpredictable--and thus more exciting--than playing against computer-controlled opponents. Online games with multiple human opponents offer fresh twists and an unlimited replay factor. For example, one U.S. produced medieval fantasy role-playing game, Ultima Online, never ends. The server hosting the game is always up so if a player leaves the game, his character is "stored" in a safe place (a tavern, for example), and the game continues to evolve and add new players. "Enabling a stand-alone game to be played online in a multiplayer environment can effectively double its life cycle and generate incremental sales for publishers," says Datamonitor consultant Frederic Diot.
European games developers are taking notice. France's Infogrames Entertainment, which has developed online games such as Outcast, an action contest, spent $1.26 million last year on research and development of multiplayer games, according to founder and chief executive officer Bruno Bonnell. Eidos, the British developer of the widely popular off-line computer game Tomb Raider--and its megastar Lara Croft--is looking to develop new online games which it will offer via its own Internet portal. "It is the obvious way to go," says Eidos chairman Ian Livingstone.

While some developers prefer to control their titles via their own portals, sites which offer games from a variety of sources are also sprouting in Europe. France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have launched their own online gaming platforms and British Telecom merged its online games venture, Wireplay, with ICE, a mail-order computer games business, creating Gameplay.com.

Datamonitor's Diot says hard-core death matchers will be willing to pay subscriptions, while casual players will not. Sites such as Uproar depend on advertising and licensing for revenue while Gameplay.com will gets its revenues from advertising, e-commerce and pay for play. Online service providers have an additional source of revenue in Europe, where local telephone calls are metered, although this inhibits market growth because people are unsure just how much they are spending. Deutsche Telekom's Community of Massive Gaming Agents (C.M.G.A.) online multiplayer gaming platform, launched Sept. 6, requires the purchase of an introductory package containing three games and software for $48. Players also must buy a gaming points card to access online games and pay telephone and Internet access costs, depending on the provider.

France Telecom is using a different model based entirely on revenues from sponsorship and advertising for its online games platform Goa, which has attracted 70,000 players in four months. An advantage of gaming platforms like Goa is that they offer consumers a hassle-free way to connect with other players.

Easy-to-operate alternatives to PC access are also expected to spur online gaming. Sega plans to launch its Dreamcast games console, which offers a built-in modem and free Internet access, in Europe on Oct. 14. Sony is due to introduce its own Internet-enabled Playstation console, Playstation2, next year while Nintendo is planning to launch a version of its GameBoy handheld machine which can connect to the Internet using a mobile phone. And both Infogrames and Uproar will offer online games for digital television providers in Europe. The games will be accessed with set-top boxes and played via remote control.

Meanwhile, offers of free Internet access, free online game time or free PCs are expected to lure even more players. If that trend continues, Europe's growing population of online gamers won't have to keep checking their watches every time they play checkers on the Net.

With reporting by MAIRI BEN BRAHIM/London