6 ms·

Simplified global game management: Introducing Game Servers

54 points by mxschmitt 7y ago

na85 7y ago
What happens when I launch my game on this platform and Google kills it next fall with no warning?
- lewisj489 7y ago
  Google - We prefer the term "Sunset"
- yellow_lead 7y ago
  You get a compensation check for your time and lost value to your business. Just kidding, you get nothing.
- dang 7y ago
  Once a reaction becomes this reflexive, it passes cliché status into off-topic status. Think of it as a Betteridge.
- jsmeaton 7y ago
  At the risk of contributing to the thing I'm railing against, these google sunset comments are so boring, especially when discussing Google Cloud products.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  absolutely nothing since the foundations are open source, you don't even have to switch provider you just boot up a kubernet cluster > Agones, an open source game server hosting and scaling project
- iwalton3 7y ago
  The underlying software is open source, so you could just host it somewhere else. https://agones.dev/site/ https://agones.dev/site/
tmpz22 7y ago
Cool, Google created a cloud-native solution for people who want to create games for Google Stadia. You can buy into the ecosystem, built on top of Kubernetes - the system recommended for large scale projects and teams with hundreds of servers (but not more then ~5,000). An ecosystem most knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless you are able to do a relatively large amount of due diligence and have dedicated staff who are domain experts for kubernetes. For Google Stadia. Which is pivoting into really pushing for exclusive titles, and was the driving force for some studios removing their games from Geforce Now, because unlike Google Stadia Geforce Now allows you to bring your own games which you already own and avoid re-buying the same game twice. Google is trying to get a juicy bite of the games industry by building a walled garden around exclusive titles and proprietary cloud setups. Microsoft and Sony have used the same tactics (particularly exclusive titles). The chief argument is access, the idea that more people can now game who previously couldn't, but I don't buy it.
- outworlder 7y ago
  > An ecosystem most knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless you are able to do a relatively large amount of due diligence and have dedicated staff who are domain experts for kubernetes Who are those 'knowledgeable SREs' and what are they recommending instead? Docker Swarm? VMs? There is a place for those approaches, but people often underestimate the amount of work that is involved to bring large services into production, work that has been packaged and commoditized by K8s, by domain experts. Moreover, it allows people to speak the same language and easily share their solutions. Actual domain experts are required (today) if you want to bring databases and other stateful workloads to Kubernetes. But stateless? I'll run MicroK8s in a Raspberry Pi if I need to run containers. There is so much stuff that's taken care of by K8s that I can't'see why one wouldn't use it, unless they need to just run a single container somewhere. > and proprietary cloud setups. Proprietary? https://github.com/googleforgames/agones https://github.com/googleforgames/agones You don't have to run it on GKE, you know. You can manage it yourself. Which I'm not sure why you would do, since you are complaining about the lack of domain expertise.
- manigandham 7y ago
  This has nothing to do with Stadia. It's open-source software (Agones) designed to run any kind of game server (packaged as a Docker container) on top of Kubernetes with easier management around things like scaling, rolling updates, session management, metrics, lifecycle SDK, etc. Google Cloud is just offering a managed version of this on top of GKE. AWS and Azure offer similar platforms and even more products (like AWS Lumberyard game engine).
vvanders 7y ago
It's been a while since I spun up a dedicated server but how is this anything special compared to just spinning up normal server instances? I see a lot of buzzwords but nothing that stands out technically. Throw some cpu+memory, open a udp socket, register with the matchmaker coordinator and away you go.
- Thaxll 7y ago
  Managing game servers at scale and being cost efficient is actually difficult.
  - vvanders 7y ago
    Well isn't everything "at scale" difficult? I just don't see what makes this special, dedicated servers don't require GPUs, just a good amount of cpu and a moderate amount of network bandwidth. This just feels more like branding existing things because games are "cool". I left that industry a few years back so maybe things have changed but I'm not seeing it.
    - Thaxll 7y ago
      Gameservers are very different in nature from the the rest of the industry ( like web services ), first of all everything is custom so it's not lile there are tools proprietary or open source for that. Even inside the same company you can have different engine with different matchmaking solution etc ... then you have to hook all of that on some platform ( cloud or bare metal ). The biggest hurdle is the cost, that the #1 issue people will have running gameservers. Imagine your game is using 1 core for 16 players, how many ec2 instance you need to accomodate 150K concurent users? ( and that's just the cost for gameservers it does not includes online services ). Now what's hard for example? DDoS protection, matchmaking, scaling up/down ( scaling down is challenging depending of the game because of server fragmentation), performance optimization, most dev use Windows to dev games but gameservers are more and more running on Linux now so how do you test that locally. The biggest challenge is that every games are different and you need something "custom" very often. Also game devs have NIH syndrom which doesn't help. Running gameservers for a serious game is not trivial, currently more challenging that puting some Java app behind a load balancer on an auto-scaling group.

54 points by mxschmitt 7y ago

na85 7y ago

What happens when I launch my game on this platform and Google kills it next fall with no warning?

lewisj489 7y ago
Google - We prefer the term "Sunset"
yellow_lead 7y ago
You get a compensation check for your time and lost value to your business. Just kidding, you get nothing.
dang 7y ago
Once a reaction becomes this reflexive, it passes cliché status into off-topic status. Think of it as a Betteridge.
jsmeaton 7y ago
At the risk of contributing to the thing I'm railing against, these google sunset comments are so boring, especially when discussing Google Cloud products.
LoSboccacc 7y ago
absolutely nothing since the foundations are open source, you don't even have to switch provider you just boot up a kubernet cluster > Agones, an open source game server hosting and scaling project
iwalton3 7y ago
The underlying software is open source, so you could just host it somewhere else. https://agones.dev/site/ https://agones.dev/site/

tmpz22 7y ago

Cool, Google created a cloud-native solution for people who want to create games for Google Stadia. You can buy into the ecosystem, built on top of Kubernetes - the system recommended for large scale projects and teams with hundreds of servers (but not more then ~5,000). An ecosystem most knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless you are able to do a relatively large amount of due diligence and have dedicated staff who are domain experts for kubernetes. For Google Stadia. Which is pivoting into really pushing for exclusive titles, and was the driving force for some studios removing their games from Geforce Now, because unlike Google Stadia Geforce Now allows you to bring your own games which you already own and avoid re-buying the same game twice. Google is trying to get a juicy bite of the games industry by building a walled garden around exclusive titles and proprietary cloud setups. Microsoft and Sony have used the same tactics (particularly exclusive titles). The chief argument is access, the idea that more people can now game who previously couldn't, but I don't buy it.

outworlder 7y ago
> An ecosystem most knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless you are able to do a relatively large amount of due diligence and have dedicated staff who are domain experts for kubernetes Who are those 'knowledgeable SREs' and what are they recommending instead? Docker Swarm? VMs? There is a place for those approaches, but people often underestimate the amount of work that is involved to bring large services into production, work that has been packaged and commoditized by K8s, by domain experts. Moreover, it allows people to speak the same language and easily share their solutions. Actual domain experts are required (today) if you want to bring databases and other stateful workloads to Kubernetes. But stateless? I'll run MicroK8s in a Raspberry Pi if I need to run containers. There is so much stuff that's taken care of by K8s that I can't'see why one wouldn't use it, unless they need to just run a single container somewhere. > and proprietary cloud setups. Proprietary? https://github.com/googleforgames/agones https://github.com/googleforgames/agones You don't have to run it on GKE, you know. You can manage it yourself. Which I'm not sure why you would do, since you are complaining about the lack of domain expertise.
manigandham 7y ago
This has nothing to do with Stadia. It's open-source software (Agones) designed to run any kind of game server (packaged as a Docker container) on top of Kubernetes with easier management around things like scaling, rolling updates, session management, metrics, lifecycle SDK, etc. Google Cloud is just offering a managed version of this on top of GKE. AWS and Azure offer similar platforms and even more products (like AWS Lumberyard game engine).

vvanders 7y ago

It's been a while since I spun up a dedicated server but how is this anything special compared to just spinning up normal server instances? I see a lot of buzzwords but nothing that stands out technically. Throw some cpu+memory, open a udp socket, register with the matchmaker coordinator and away you go.

Thaxll 7y ago
Managing game servers at scale and being cost efficient is actually difficult.
- vvanders 7y ago
  Well isn't everything "at scale" difficult? I just don't see what makes this special, dedicated servers don't require GPUs, just a good amount of cpu and a moderate amount of network bandwidth. This just feels more like branding existing things because games are "cool". I left that industry a few years back so maybe things have changed but I'm not seeing it.
  - Thaxll 7y ago
    Gameservers are very different in nature from the the rest of the industry ( like web services ), first of all everything is custom so it's not lile there are tools proprietary or open source for that. Even inside the same company you can have different engine with different matchmaking solution etc ... then you have to hook all of that on some platform ( cloud or bare metal ). The biggest hurdle is the cost, that the #1 issue people will have running gameservers. Imagine your game is using 1 core for 16 players, how many ec2 instance you need to accomodate 150K concurent users? ( and that's just the cost for gameservers it does not includes online services ). Now what's hard for example? DDoS protection, matchmaking, scaling up/down ( scaling down is challenging depending of the game because of server fragmentation), performance optimization, most dev use Windows to dev games but gameservers are more and more running on Linux now so how do you test that locally. The biggest challenge is that every games are different and you need something "custom" very often. Also game devs have NIH syndrom which doesn't help. Running gameservers for a serious game is not trivial, currently more challenging that puting some Java app behind a load balancer on an auto-scaling group.