ScottKevill: Actually, less-popular games work far better without lobbies.

Many of the popular games you see on GameRanger didn't start that way. They were resurrected and revived by the way GameRanger is designed.

You have to look at the psychological aspects to understand why this is. Someone comes to an empty (or mostly-empty) lobby, they see that it's a ghost town, decide that the game is dead, and then leave. The next person does the same thing. This is the dark side of both "the network effect" and crowds-attract-crowds.

That's one of the reasons why GameSpy Arcade and Voobly failed to attract the numbers that GameRanger has.

Instead of relying on a lobby-per-game, GameRanger lets you mix and match to list together all the games that you're interested in. When you open an R6 game room, it will immediately notify everyone else online that has it installed (via balloon tooltips from the icon in the system tray). This means that even if you don't find a game immediately, you will be notified just by being online (even with GameRanger invisibly minimised to the tray).

This has the benefit of exposing R6 to other players that still had it installed, but weren't actively looking for a game. With a specific lobby, those players would have to initiate their interest. This is why lobby-per-game means the game will never grow. You see a handful of players in those Voobly lobbies now, but that's only because they decided as a group, to go there (it was a pre-existing micro-community on a website).

Due to the way the games list is displayed in GameRanger, this also advertises R6 to other players that don't even have it installed. This includes old R6 vets that are on GameRanger playing other games, as well as new players that haven't tried R6 before.

Since GameRanger is so popular with so many games (and hence has such a high number of users online at any given time), the friends list is very powerful for advertising games. Players will see at a glance that their friends playing R6.

There are more aspects than this, and the subtle details go much deeper of course, but this should give you some idea. This has been carefully refined since 1997.

Trivia: GameRanger was the official service for R6, RS, GhR, and RvS on the Mac (long before even GameSpy Arcade existed). I'm the developer.

Trivia: The developer of Voobly was the one that created and sold many of the cheats for R6 and RS (aka tormentium). Not to mention all of the cheats for the Age of Empires series.