In 2010 I was looking for a good Game Server Hosting capable of hosting high-quality GRAW (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfare) servers, and all the really good ones I played were all hosted by AOWC (Art Of War Central), which claimed to be the largest and oldest in the business, and I was immediately impressed by the amount of games they had in their catalog and the monstrous size of their datacenter.
First I spoke to Steve Phallen (owner) about the possibility of being able to use my administration scripts on my game servers, as no other would be possible, like GameServers for example, which had very limited capabilities, both in terms of games, which would not be able to host a game of mine like Quake 2 Evolved Blood Culture, and even our control of the servers.
I presented my Scripts to him to make sure they weren’t malicious and he was impressed with all the possibilities they provide in administration and we started talking, and he also got to know my games and admire them to the point of wanting to host them all on AOWC.
We established a partnership between AOWC and Blood Culture Multigaming, where they would host as many servers as necessary to host my games, and in exchange I would advertise AOWC in all my games, websites and promotional videos. We closed this partnership on April 7, 2010.
From then on, I started working directly with Dallas Behling (Director of Operations), and my scripts were gradually incorporated into the online system. Over time, I proposed and implemented with him not only considerable improvements to what already existed, but also completely new solutions, all with the quality I would like to manage my own servers.
Dallas really liked my promotional videos and asked me to make tutorial videos for AOWC, which was opening a YouTube channel to help users with the most common to advanced tasks. I made more than a dozen videos for the channel.
Our partnership remained strong and steady until the company’s last day of operation on April 5, 2014, when AOWC was forced to close its doors after more than 13 years of activity.
The main reason for the closure was the same reason that practically all the good companies in the industry closed down. There was a change in focus from the big gaming companies to no longer publicly release dedicated servers for their games, and adding the exclusivity contracts like those of GameServers, for example, was making the survival of the other hosting companies unsustainable every day.
Dallas even bought Steve‘s company in February 2013 to try to recover it, but with fewer and fewer active clans, there were fewer customers willing to rent game servers to play. This was a hard blow to all Game Server Hosting companies around the world, which were losing customers quickly and closing one after the other. I believe that GameServers is only alive today due to the strong partnerships and exclusivity it achieved with the main and largest companies in the industry, including Call of Duty (Activision).
A relevant fact is that I had published most of my Scripts on my support forum in 2008, and they were already somewhat well-known when I closed my partnership with AOWC. After we started implementing them, Dallas asked me to remove at least the most advanced ones from my forum, and they were promptly removed.
I was a GameServers client for many years, mainly due to their exclusive partnership with Call of Duty servers, where I maintained several Black Frontlines servers for more than a decade, between 2011 and 2023. Several innovations that I created for AOWC have also appeared sporadically on GameServers, as well as on the best Game Server Hosting companies in the world. But none of them ever reached 50% of what we implemented at AOWC.
