JaggedSac said:
NJ5 said:
JaggedSac said:
I don't know if MS has any deals with external clients, and I am not even sure if they should give money to them for their own dedicated servers. If MS thought dedicated servers were necessary to the backbone of their service, they obviously would offer them. But they figured a scalable architecture would be best for a platform wide offering. And I tend to agree with this sentiment.
I also enjoy the fact that MS offers platform wide services such as parties and invites. Me and my buds will join up in parties and jump from game to game with ease. The party system also integrates very well with the matchmaking system. So we go from game to game and just have a blast. It is this simplicity, reliability, and ubiquity that I enjoy about Live. Sit on my couch and play online games with my friends.
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Player-hosted servers are only scalable from MS's cost perspective, as they don't need to spend a lot of money on servers for more players. The match making servers are an expense, but they pale in comparison to the bandwidth and CPU power that a game server needs.
For actual game-playing (the core function of online gaming), player-hosted servers are not scalable, which is why many 360 games support less simultaneous players than PC games.
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So do you have an idea on how many servers are necessary for 2 million concurrent gamers where 30% might be looking for matches at once?
I was speaking of scalability for the ability to handle an expanding user base in a more efficient manner. Handling 2 million concurrent players in CoD MW2 would be a hell of a task(and hella expensive) using only dedicated servers.
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Why would 30% of players be looking for matches at the same time? Do you spend 30% of your online time looking for matches?
As for how many dedicated servers they would need: Let's say 5 million users are playing online at any given moment... and let's say each dedicated server can handle just 100 players (it can probably handle much more than that, especially if using multicore CPUs for the servers). That means they need 50,000 servers running. With 20 million users paying $50 dollars a year (or $1 billion in revenue), if they spent all the money on servers that would cost $20,000 per server per year.
That's an insane price, when many companies offer RETAIL prices of $59 per month per server (and that's not the cheapest by any means).
