It’s not just the developer’s fault. In most cases, it’s not the developer’s fault at all. Take for example, what happened during the launch of Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout. After 1.5 million players attempted to play the game, the servers collapsed, and the game stopped working. The cause of the problem is far too complex for a simple Twitter post, as The Guardian details:
As with most social media blow-ups, the answer is far too nuanced for Twitter to cope with, but it comes down to this: running a global large-scale multiplayer online game is an expensive, technologically complex endeavour, even in 2020, even after weeks of beta testing and data analysis. Jon Shiring, co-founder of new studio Gravity Well and previously a lead engineer on Apex Legends and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, puts it very simply: “Each game relies on a lot of semi-independent services, and each one is its own scale problem. On top of that, sometimes they interact in complex ways.”
One key thing to understand is that game developers usually don’t own or operate the servers that online games run on. Instead, they are rented. A multiplayer game may rely on servers housed in dozens of data centres spread across the world, and there are hundreds of different companies running such centres. Alternatively, a developer may use a large cloud-based service such as AWS, Google Compute Engine, or Microsoft Azure, which run games on virtual machines that share server space among lots of different users. The former option, commonly using “bare metal” servers, can lead to better online performance but is complicated to manage; the latter is easier to manage, and to scale up and down depending on player demand, but can be much more expensive.
Image via The Guardian
Comments (1)
Way too many games are now dead because the games rely on those third party servers that cost money to keep running.
and they should have had sven. oh well!
never seen -51 before :O
It's -45f with the windchill right now.
The other day it was -61f with the windchill.
Perhaps the banana test should be the defining factor on closings...
Hot water trick is always fun
It sublimates. The hot liquid water breaks up into ice crystals and then much of that goes directly into a gas state. That part which doesn't falls as snow.
It's almost the same thing that happens when you hang wet clothes out in winter. They freeze, and then they dry as the ice goes from a solid directly to a gas without passing thru the water state.
Sublimation.
Neat huh?