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Why not use cloud services to host MMO?
ananda
Member UncommonPosts: 45
Just something I wondered about MMO launches in general. I recently joined Neverwinter's open beta launch, where some capacity issues occured and a queue system was introduced (briefly). Of course, most people claims that this is to be expected for a launch, they couldn't know in advance that there would be so many players, etc.
But looking at the game's infrastructure, it is already built to handle variable number of players. Each area in the game can have multiple copies, and to play with your friends you will have to gather on the same copy. I believe this is standard across most if not all MMOs today? So, the number of players should not even be an issue, it should be something that could be solved easily with enough server-side hardware.
So my question is, why aren't MMO companies outsourcing these hardware requirements and use the cloud? I thought one of the advantages of using cloud computing is the scalability. You need more capacity during launch rush hour (or any future special events, for example), you can have it instantly, just maybe pay a bit more for that duration. After that, if your population stabilises at a lower level, you can just as easily scale down and pay less. (I actually don't know that much about the cloud, so I may be a victim of marketing and this may be very naive of me, lol)
Comments
Some of the folks who were trying to use the Red Dwarf Server back in 2010 were planning on running MMOs from the Cloud, some of them even got test-games running Amazon's S3 cloud servers.
After 2010 I haven't seen anyone else interested in running stuff from the cloud. The idea seems dead. Not sure why.
Cloud technology was going to save the world. Some of us realised that you need to take extravagant claims made by those with a vested interest with a pinch of salt. The fact every IT journalist and his dog jumped on the band wagon to tell us what a revoultion it would be was not a surprise as they do that every time.
Cloud tech is out there and it is useful, just not the new amazing next thing that will change the world, that journalists like to write articles about every year.
Because cloud services, especially those similar in pricing to Amazon, are far more expensive than getting, making, or renting your own host servers full time or creating your own cloud using rented/created servers.
Also, many MMO's ARE hosted through a cloud-based setup. Especially newer ones.
I am not sure the point of the question, as developers are beginning to use cloud services more.
I am also not sure what Scot is referring to, as I have read the same articles and they are certainly true. It is all happening as we speak.
Cloud technology is ingenius, just as torrents are ingenius, or the development of AdBlocker, which I encourage people to use on this whore of a website where there are more ads than website. Those techs may not feel as revolutionary as the GPU or the creation of the internet, but it is a great new technology just as the others are.
Of course, some of the essence of "the cloud" have always been around, such as offloading too much bandwidth to other servers. It's actually the SERVICE that is new, not as much the tech. The SERVICE is not anywhere near as revolutionary or as awesome, except in some smaller circumstances. Once again, that is because it is MORE expensive for some, while LESS expensive for others.
What I am getting at is that we were told dedicated servers would be dead in a couple of years and you would not need a top rated PC as even the oldest one would be powered by the Cloud. These were the sort of extravagent claims being made.
Cloud tech is an important part of internet services around the world today, just not the game changer it was hailed as. Long term of course it may deliver more startling change, but that remains to be seen.
100% Agree!
Oh, well nevermind then. You're entirely right, lol. Dedicated servers dead? Lmao...
I must have read only a few articles then, and missed most of them.
My apologies.
I am pretty sure most people do.
I just got done reading a thread about how this site is becoming NSFW. People literally have others look at them, thinking they are visiting a anime fetish site or a softcore porn site.
Meanwhile, the owner legitimately believes he has integrity and ethics when selling out his soul to ads, which have INCLUDED ads for Evony the Scam.
Direct Quote from Craig "Integrity" McGregory in a dicussion about the site ads, "…greed and money does not rule this company, ethics and integrity do."
After visiting this website, not a single soul alive would believe him.
The point of the question, is I was just puzzled. An MMO launch day is a perfect example of the need for "scalability", which is touted as one of the benefits of cloud. It is an extreme peak concurrent usage that will probably never be repeated again, unless your game turns out to be wildly successful and you release and expansion or something. It doesn't make sense financially to prepare for this one-off event if you are using your own hardware, but I thought the cloud seems to be a perfect solution to this.
Anyways, I guess you have answered the question. If as you said they are using the cloud, I guess even then they are still not willing to pay that extra to have a smooth launch experience? Perhaps it really is not worth it, since it is probably accepted as a fact of life by now, and very few players are likely to leave as a result of launch day issues.
Can you explain why is that so? Are you talking about how some cloud service provider charges more than others? Or that using the cloud would be more expensive for some game developers/publishers, but cheaper for others, depending on their circumstances?
We are using Cloud Servers for our game.
So far it's working great!
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
Depending on what you're doing, cloud services can either be very cost effective or ridiculously expensive. I would think MMOs fall into the expensive side of things. Then there's a lack of control that comes with using the cloud that may not work for very large scale projects like MMOs. A physical server reboot when the software updates or something like that might not be possible or modifications to the server's kernel code may not be possible either. Who knows.
I would bet it comes down to money and control.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
For very small MMO's it's going to cost you a lot less effort and possibly cash to keep some EC2 instances running your game. The amount of time to get a stable and secure network, and keeping it there makes it very practical to run on something like EC2. On EC2 200 players(always online, 24/7) is around $350 a month, from guestimates I've done a few times. however EC2 allows you to bring servers up and down at he touch of a button, so with some good architecture you could probably half that. You also don't account for man-time-costs of development, which will always be more expensive even for an utterly incompetent team.
For an MMO that is actually massive and utterly commercial. You're at the point where you can save A LOT every month by having your own servers and support, with only the disadvantage of needing to buy your own hardware. Once you get to the scale where hiring people solely for IT support is nothing but a cost of doing business, everything just becomes cheaper.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
100% Agree!
I am pretty sure most people do.
I just got done reading a thread about how this site is becoming NSFW. People literally have others look at them, thinking they are visiting a anime fetish site or a softcore porn site.
Meanwhile, the owner legitimately believes he has integrity and ethics when selling out his soul to ads, which have INCLUDED ads for Evony the Scam.
Direct Quote from Craig "Integrity" McGregory in a dicussion about the site ads, " greed and money does not rule this company, ethics and integrity do."
After visiting this website, not a single soul alive would believe him.
There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for this treachery.It's not just a question of using the cloud or not, but also of what you use it for.
Streaming games from the cloud via OnLive or a similar service is a ridiculous idea for gaming, for reasons that we've been over before many times. For "free to play" MMORPGs, it's actually a lot worse than for other games, as it introduces a considerable cost per player to host servers while restricting you to offering a very low end gaming experience that will probably only appeal to people who would never pay anyway. That makes it unlikely that you'd get enough revenue to cover server costs, let alone game development costs.
Another type of cloud usage is TERA's use of The Happy Cloud as a game download method. It will first download what you need for the starting areas and let you start playing the game while it continues to download the rest of the game for you. It's optional, so a player who wants to download the full game before playing can do so. Depending on how it's priced, that might well make a lot of sense.
But neither of those are what the original poster is talking about. He's talking about server hosting by using the Amazon cloud or some such instead of buying your own servers. For a sufficiently small project, that likely makes sense. But once it scales up far enough, anemo is probably right: it's cheaper to buy your own servers and hire your own IT people. That also lets you customize everything to the needs of your particular game, rather than Amazon or some other cloud hoster guessing at what you need.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Are you running your own CS? If not, who are you using?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
We are using Toggle. $400 per month for 8 cores, 64 gigs of Ram, 500 gigs of HD Space, and 50TB of Bandwidth per month. Our Net connection is a 100mb/s line with the ability to upgrade to as high as 2,000mb/s for just $20 extra per month.
We can scale up or down as needed with extra resources being fairly cheap for example each additional Core we need is just $5 per month extra while extra IP addresses are just $1 extra per month.
togglebox.com
Company Owner
MMO Interactive
I imagine for Indy devs, easy and inexpensive access to cloud hosting is a huge advantage.
FYI: Azure (Microsoft cloud) is currently offering 3 months of free hosting (up to 20 cores).
For basic setup each core on Azure is roughly 60$/month, if done individually.
-Werellama
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
Thank You.
I guess I thought you were doing your own.
What would you say has been your peak number of connections/ports used?
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
This.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
At least for the initial release phase or times with high demand some additional "cloud capacity" could be used. Since there are different technologies available (IaaS / SaaS/ Paas/ etc.) you can easily pick that which fits best (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.