Noone would ever put down server infrastructure to support this kind of a player surge. It’s like building a dam - you either build it to withstand a ‘100-year flood’ or a ‘50-year flood’, never the ‘1000-year biblical freaking flood’ because the dam would be too expensive and you’ll probably die before seeing such a flood anyway.
Wouldn’t a cloud based solution be more appropriate then? You scale it based on need. Cloud computing has so many advantages. Of course, I don’t know how it would be implemented for video games. However, from my experience a client has so much flexibility with a cloud model.
This makes sense, but I’m not at all well-versed in what the industry supplies these days, so I just don’t know.
It’s okay. I’m a washed up IT Tech who hasn’t been following the industry either. It’s just fun to think about these types of things when they pop up, because it is something I know about. In case you don’t know. Cloud Computing provides developers a flexible pay model that is based on what they’re using - this is how it’s scalable; if you’re not using much the bill is reflected on that. You’re also, basically, renting someone else’s computing processes to run whatever service you need. Cloud based computing has been gaining tractions, see for instance the rise of GeForce Now. A cloud based model where you’re able to play video games without needing the hardware to do so via a streaming service. Google Stadia is another good example too, too bad it failed though.
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Google Stadia was the most consumer hostile technology in the last decade.
Good luck preserving games when you never have any access to their data.
It’s a blessing that it failed.
Things like Nvidia Geforce Now is much better in every way, since all you’re doing is renting a computer to stream off. You still need to own the games and have some kind of direct access to game data, so you don’t just lose everything you paid for if the service shuts down.
Note here that every Stadia user got all their purchases refunded, because absolutely every thing people paid for was removed.
Thanks. I have worked with Azure in the past, but our needs were much less dynamic. It’s nice if you can scale your plan up and down to smooth the peaks out without having to rent unused power later.
But getting back to the point: I have been noticing that crashes and backend errors get the fastest treatment from FS as opposed to anything actually game-related. I think that is because service availability and crash log telemetry is much more easily quantifiable and therefore easier to fix down as a KPI than the more ethereal matters like ‘player user experience’ etc. So all that (and the way FS treats beta feedback) hints me that the betas are there mostly to stress-test their infrastructure with good random real user load.
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Oh I fully agree with you there. Player experience was most certainly not prioritized at all - which is a huge problem! From the vague promises of improving performance, to taking forever to address critical bugs that have been impacting end user experience, it’s safe to say that Fatshark’s priorities were most certainly not inline with providing users a good experience. It doesn’t make sense to focus on server side stability when people couldn’t even launch your freaking application. People still have issues launching the game. Then there’s the precedence of focusing on an MTX shop before solving critical problems affecting users.
In any other industry, people would have been fired or written up for this clear mismanagement.
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Yeah I relate to this sentiment several times a day reading these forums. Gaming industry is the new Hollywood - oversaturated with money and new ways of redistributing them in your favour, and still growing every year. Funnily enough - even during the covid years, despite all the instances of using the pandemic as an excuse to fail at your job (which turns out to be like the most condusive one to working remotely incidentally). And as any other expression of capitalism, the more money there is to gain, the more prominent the goal of extracting profit becomes, which in turn is fundamentally at odds with anything else in the real world.
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honestly it actually can be a localization nightmare, assuming you’re not handing off to third parties who will take their pound of proverbial flesh. That’s why a lot of companies actually do these kinds of direct sales through a stand alone web portal.