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The internet doesn't care about multiplayer games
- Porthos9K 7y agoIsn't this why we used to get together and have LAN parties, so that we could play on a 10/100mbps network without other Internet traffic in the way? (And so that if a player started trash-talking the rest of us could beat the shit out of them?) Also, was the sales pitch in the second half really necessary?
- toxicFork 7y agoThe point of the post is the sales pitch.
- _Microft 7y agoAnd the submitter is the CEO as it seems. "user: gafferongames created: November 26, 2014 karma: 173 about: Founder and CEO, Network Next."
- tempguy9999 7y agoIs this within HN rules to post sales pitches, esp. by HN members, at least without being very clear about it?
- close04 7y agoI think this is exactly what HN is for. You're free to promote your project. It's just a shame that this project, while a technical achievement, puts them solidly on moral low ground.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoSurely this is preferable to the trivial circumvention of your proposal where you just ask a friend to post something for you. A trick that basically silences all Redditors that would otherwise complain about “ads”. I’d rather people just post their own stuff and we judge the content on its own basis.
- techlaw 7y agoIt is preferable to the extent that the poster is transparent about their intentions. The user name posting this could be 'NetworkNext' or a brief disclosure could be in the original post -- either of these would provide some transparency. With transparency there would be fewer clicks on the link but greater trust in the content.
- tempguy9999 7y agoExactly this. I'm fine with people posting their own stuff but I want to know.
- Krasnol 7y agoAt my time it was because the Internet was too slow in the first place and too expansive. Also it was nice to get together, play, drink and smoke weed for a whole weekend.
- drharby 7y agoOk, tell that to the wow classic servers all operating a medium to high capacity. EDIT: oh I see, this is an ad, not news, got it.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoDepends on the game: a real time first person shooter needs better latency than a real time strategy game which needs much better latency than a turn based game.
- t0ddbonzalez 7y agoGreat advertisement. Thanks. /s
- BlueTemplar 7y agoA lot of games already (excusively!) use private networks these days, and even older games like Dawn of War 1 and Civilization 4* had their Internet multiplayer removed for Steam's (V?)PN. A lot of blame is on "I"SPs filtering traffic and sometimes not even giving access to the router so that the host can do port forwarding! *Non-Steam Civ4 still has Internet multiplayer. After complaints Steam also allowed to revert to the latest official patch using their "beta" feature (for some reason the new Steam patch also breaks the mods - even if they are played even more overwhelmingly in single player! - and Civ4 has one of the biggest mod communities thanks to its semi-open source C++/Python/XML modding).
- Snetry 7y agoI'm fairly sure Steam does not use a private network
- blattimwind 7y agoIt does. CSGO game traffic is exclusively routed through Valve's relay network for example. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/steamdatagramrelay https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/stea...
- BlueTemplar 7y agoTechnically maybe not (?), but if the end result is that you cannot connect to someone hosting the game without also both of you running Steam (and a Steam version of the game), because you don't even have the option to input their IP - what's the difference ?
- everyone 7y agoThis is obviously a thinly veiled ad. Why is this here?
- drivingmenuts 7y agoThis looks and smells like an advertisement, rather than an article.
- huffmsa 7y agoIt's pretty well disguised
- chungus_khan 7y agoNot really. The entire article is about pitching their service and the post here was made by the founder of the company.
- edynoid 7y agoPaying for traffic to be prioritized is the exact opposite of net neutrality. No need to pay lip service to the idea then. The obvious danger here is that small indie studios may not be able to afford making enjoyable real-time multiplayer games. How about improving public internet infrastructure instead?
- TulliusCicero 7y agoLook at it from the perspective of a random game developer: which one do you actually have more control over? You're essentially asking, "why don't you ignore the thing that definitely works right now, and instead try the thing that might work out in a decade or two if you get lucky?" Why would any sane business choose that option?
- vanderZwan 7y agoNo, the actual business question for indy developers is "why do you expect us to agree to buying a thing that we can't afford, instead of demanding at the societal level that we all improve the public good that we actually do have access to instead?" That's what GPs remark of "only big players can afford private networks" was about, and it's the opposite of what you're claiming.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoAs a small indie developer I don't understand your argument. Building a network like Riot can only be done by billion dollar publishers, but I could conceivably use this network. If you don't want solutions like this, are you also against private networks? In addition to Riot, Google famously cuts the gordian knot of CAP in Spanner by declaring their network won't go down. If it's ok to do it yourself but not outsource it, "think of the little guy" holds no water.
- ArtWomb 7y agoRiot's investment in private cloud is in turn informing game design for an upcoming FPS codename: Project A ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iGU6PctOBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iGU6PctOBg
- PeterStuer 7y agoYet another network provisioner's marketing department trying to spin the 'network neutrality is bad' spiel as if life would be so much better if only those pesky regulators would allow any means for ISP's to extract the maximum profit out of every packet, even if that means creating artificial scarcity. It's like hearing Nestle arguing how the availability of drinkable municipal tap water is bad for their bottled water business.
- ReptileMan 7y agoWhy do people confuse QOS with network neutrality? Those are two completely separate concerns. Still baffles me to this day.
- pjc50 7y agoThe fear has always been extortion: pay or we'll traffic-shape your application into uselessness.
- ReptileMan 7y agoYeah but my videochat needs low ping, my torrents and netflix - not so much. I am totally fine with having two lanes - fast for sensitive traffic and slow. Pay as much you consume. This can be mandated to be neutral.
- pjc50 7y agoWho gets to control the "sensitive" label and the pricing? How does pricing work in markets where there is only one viable choice of consumer ISP?
- londons_explore 7y agoOne could easily imagine lanes controlled by the end user. For example, "You pay $60 per month for a 50Mbit cable connection consisting of 1 Gigabyte of low latency traffic and unlimited regular traffic". Then the user can set certain programs to be "low latency" using an app available from the cable company. If they want more low-latency traffic, they can pay extra. Actual implementation through CGNAT could simply involve having different source port ranges for low latency traffic.
- onion2k 7y agoThis must be why there aren't any multiplayer games that use the internet. Oh. Wait.
- Spivak 7y agoThis is also why behind the scenes large game publishers have their own private networks. Valve is probably the largest.
- pjc50 7y ago> every ten seconds, Network Next runs a bid on its marketplace to find the best route for your players across our supplier networks. > The winning bid carries your player's traffic for the next 10 seconds, then the process is repeated every 10 seconds, for each player Markets in everything! Like realtime ad markets, it's one of those things that's simultaneously an impressive technical achievement and a Randian nickel-and-diming nightmare. Like surge pricing, I wonder if there's any incentive for some of the actors to manipulate the system to raise prices ...
- berbec 7y agoWhat they really need is to add BlockChain.
- ambicapter 7y agoYou could start undercutting bids when your competitor's games come out, hoping that if their game's multiplayer is shitty enough on opening weekend it'll reduce the game's playing population in the long run.
- leg100 7y agoThis reflects the fact that a shadow 'internet' is emerging: alongside the public internet with its tier 1 ISPs, there are global private networks with vast bandwidth, ostensibly for a company's own use, but with opportunities arising for use cases just like this, selling off surplus bandwidth via marketplaces.
- kristofferc 7y agoFrom my experience of playing way too much computer games in my youth, the Internet seems to work extremely well for multiplayer games... Of course, if you play against someone on the other side of the world, there will be some lag but that is mostly due to things that are not so easy to change, like the speed of light.
- majewsky 7y ago> the speed of light We still have quite a bit of optimizations to make until real-life latencies are limited by the speed of light over such distances. For any given two points, the shortest distance between them along earth's surface is never going to be longer than half the earth's circumference. Light travels that distance in 67ms: $ units --verbose 'pi * earthradius / c' milliseconds pi * earthradius / c = 66.763248 milliseconds Double that for a full roundtrip time. In reality, the ping time between myself (in Germany) and the opposite site of the earth (in this case, my company's datacenter in Sydney) is more like 300 ms, i.e. less than 50% of the speed limit imposed by the laws of physics.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoA easily remembered number is that c makes for 5,000km/frame @60FPS
- iso947 7y ago67ms each way. My UK-Syd latency is currently 265ms, in theory it could be as low as 112ms if it were in a vacuum. In glass with a refractive index of 1.3-1.5, you’re looking at nearer 150-170ms rtt. Starlink and similar Leo satellites might even have a lower latency as they use laser via vacuum
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- reallydontask 7y agoYour calculation doesn't seem to account for the fact that light in fibre travels slower than in vacuum, 2/3 if memory serves, so it's a lot closer than you think. A lot of the latency will be due to the conversion between light and electricity for processing in routers/switches. If we had all optical processing that would probably bring the latency down close to the theoretical limit
- mrkeen 7y ago> The internet doesn't care about multiplayer games Good. This is how things should be with regard to dependencies. Games depend on the internet. If the internet gets rewritten, you'd have to rewrite your games. Low likelihood (of the internet changing), "medium" cost (to rewrite games). If the internet did care about multiplayer games, then changes to multiplayer games could require us to change the internet too. High likelihood (of games changing), enormous cost (to update the internet).
- raxxorrax 7y agoI think it should care about games and that it already does. A lot of development for computers was made possible because of gaming. Today streaming is also a huge factor. But the principle is the same that any low latency application will profit from expectations that are created by consumers on a large scale. So I think the premise of the article is wrong. The "net" does care about speed and latency. And I doubt a Balkanization of private networks will be advantageous for anyone besides the respective providers. Premium traffic shouldn't be the goal. Common infrastructure that can handle the load is and exclusive network access should be minimized to as few applications as possible.
- huffmsa 7y agoBut multiplayer games are indicative of an increased consumer demand for stable, synchronous connections. So are video calls. Live streaming, etc. You're missing the forest for the tree you don't like
- shkkmo 7y agoIf the needs of the internet using public change, the networks that server that public should also change. The internet should absolutely care about how well it is serving the needs of its users.
- STRML 7y agoWhy is obvious marketing material allowed here?
- devit 7y agoProbably should at least change the title, since this is a sales pitch for Network Next and not an article about multiplayer games.
- Accujack 7y agoYup, this is just spam.
- Aeolun 7y agoIn my fairly broad experience, the biggest enemy of performant gameplay is lack of servers, or incredibly shitty netcode. It’s interesting that there’s apparently no average netcode. Multiplayer either functions (apparently) perfectly, or it’s shit.
- meheleventyone 7y agoIt's one of those things where the success is unsung because when it's working you shouldn't notice it's there but when it's not then it's really obvious. Average network implementations exist its just that they work over a smaller range of conditions than top tier implementations. The enemy of average implementations is actually low populations with a wide geographic spread so players are encountering poor conditions more often. With high populations average implementations generally do okay because you can match up players that will all experience good conditions. Then you have all the gameplay smoke and mirrors that can dramatically change the felt impact of poor network conditions.
- inetknght 7y ago> the biggest enemy of performant gameplay is lack of servers, or incredibly shitty netcode. If an ISP were down-prioritizing unknown packets (such as most games since they don't usually use HTTP) then how would you notice that instead of "incredibly shitty netcode"?
- PeterStuer 7y agoThere is no such thing as an 'unknown packet'. Your ISP employs Deep Packet Inspection. So they can downgrade your game but not mine because I pay them to. https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/deep-packet-inspection-DPI https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/deep-pack...
- Aeolun 7y agoAll games would be shit? I mean, if you have one known good game, and it still turns shit, it may be somewhere beyond the game code.
- anilakar 7y agoPaid advert from a private transit provider.
- saschag 7y agowhats with the advertisement on HN? it's not even an issue for none of my multiplayer games.
- McTossOut 7y agoAll this lip service being paid basically because designers want the relationship between network conditions and arbitrary gameplay mechanics obfuscated. You think someone would have thoroughly solved this in some sort of engine-y game-y thing, or at least have built some supporting analysis tools. Such is art.
- excalibur 7y agoIt's the Internet We Deserve™
- turk73 7y agoA big reason I stopped playing those first person shooter gamaes, aside from the complete waste of time, is that ping time is king. If you ping sucks, you are at a tremendous disadvantage. It's kind of sad that so many forms of competition we engage in have a price tag attached. I quit long range shooting for the same reason--it ends up not being about skill but more about how much you paid for your barrel and other gear.
- ajnin 7y ago> neutral marketplace Nothing neutral about that. The one with the most money gets the better QoS. We don't need yet another market ruining things the real world uses so that some finance type can make bank. I wish ads for hostile ideas like that one would be flagged as such.
- shadowgovt 7y agoThe Internet also doesn't care about near-zero latency for things like telerobotic surgery, so this could very well be a step in the right direction. Granted, regarding the specific details of this solution, I don't think I want to trust my telerobotic surgery to a system that could let a multiplayer game distributor out-bid my knife control packets...
- justincredible 7y agoIndirect argument against net neutrality. At least he can still say "won't somebody please think of the children?".
- irq-1 7y agoValve offers this for free: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/steamdatagramrelay https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/stea... > Steam Datagram Relay (SDR) is Valve's virtual private gaming network. Using our APIs, you can not only carry your game traffic over the Valve backbone that is dedicated for game content, you also gain access to our network of relays. Relaying the traffic protects your servers and players from DoS attack, because IP addresses are never revealed. All traffic you receive is authenticated, encrypted, and rate-limited. Furthermore, for a surprisingly high number of players, we can also find a faster route through our network, which actually improves player ping times.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Const-me 7y agoFor 33% of your sales, not for free.
- SkyBelow 7y agoDon't they allow you to sell steam keys without giving them a cut?
- sosodev 7y agoIt’s definitely done but I’m not sure if it’s technically allowed
- Const-me 7y agoThey do, but they also say you can’t sell keys outside steam for 66% of the steam price, has to be at least 100%.
- brandon 7y agoThe specific rules for key sales are covered here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3 https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
- iamaelephant 7y agoArticles should declare up front if they are sales pieces. I got most of the way through this article without realizing Network Next was a product and I was reading a marketing piece. Not cool.
- lonelappde 7y ago"Net Neutrality" is a poisoned term. All it means is "good prices on MY use case." People whom want free stuff claim "neutrality" means "same price for everything (without defining the units of 'everything'), and no QoS" "neutrality" means not discriminating on the basis of identity. It means offering the same terms to everyone, and not letting Disney pay a fee to ban Comcast or BitTorrent, not offering only one flat price for all possible services.
- nixpulvis 7y agoI think at a high level we can all agree that there are two main classes of networks. Bandwidth sensitive: for example Netflix, or a JS bloated website. And latency sensitive: for example gaming and autonomous vehicles. My top concern is transparency with respect to what routes are available. I wouldn't want my domain to be excluded. How the backend economics play out will influence this. Large players will eat the variations (in the beginning at least), and small devs could have access to a better tier of networks. I just fear pricing models will become even more user hostile however (compared to the current service economy). Think Uber pricing for games. Surging to 4x+ prices after school, for example.
- ga-vu 7y agoOh look, another supporter of internet paid lanes disguising propaganda as an "expert blog post"
- forgottenpass 7y agoI'm a bit lost. Which of these is this advertisement claiming: - Without their route planning, latency is introduced by packets spending too much time in a device while it chooses which route to send them? - Without their route planning, latency is introduced by packets traveling geographically inefficent routes? - Internet routing technology isn't able determine the best path to send packets along? - The internet links are too saturated, route onto our network as fast as possible?
- proc0 7y agoI wonder if something like a gaming VPN is any improvement on the current way games use networking resources. This could be a service that 3rd party games require, or could be built into Unity etc., such that online multiplayer (at least on PC) could be secure and also fast.
- LinuxBender 7y agoIt is useful, or in some cases required when inbound ports/nats can not be opened up. That's why hamachi was so popular with gamers for a while. You basically bridge your LAN with the other players. Valve is just doing this in a way that is more integrated into their platform. In garry's mode, they call it "Peer to peer" but they are using this relay network.
- proc0 7y agoAh nice, was wondering if Valve did this.
- miker64 7y agoI see a bunch of network neutrality confusion here. This is not anti-net neutrality, nor is it pro-net neutrality. It's saying: Rather than accept the unknown path between your customers and you, pay for this service and you can use our optimized backbone reducing the amount of time your traffic is on random networks that aren't optimized for the exact network tuning you need/want. Network neutrality has to do with public transit networks not favoring certain traffic, generally identified by having _paid_ for preferential treatment. These folks are _not_ running a public transit network, they're running a _private transit network_ with peering points back to the public internet for access by consumers and producers.