4 ms·

The best thing that's ever happened for multiplayer games?

20 points by gafferongames 3mo ago

zuzululu 3mo ago
I expect Amazon to change their pricing once they've established a foothold and makes me a bit wary to adopting it. Their other offerings are simply far too expensive which you will naturally reach out for.
- dieselgate 3mo ago
  Do know that you cannot trust Amazon.
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    I can trust Amazon in general. Just not going to assume that something that costs them a lot will remain free for me to use.
    - gafferongames 3mo ago
      Maybe it doesn't cost them a lot, actually.
fivetenpen 3mo ago
Its free, until it’s not
iammjm 3mo ago
Would this also mean lower latency between two locations? One interesting case for me would be lowering latency in StarCraft: Brood War, which is cursed by having 90% of its player base in South Korea, with the rest of us foreigners spread all over the world.
- gafferongames 3mo ago
  The speed of light is not just a good idea, it's the law!
frollogaston 3mo ago
"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.
- gafferongames 3mo ago
  Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.
  - JohnMakin 3mo ago
    You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?
    - gafferongames 3mo ago
      If a normal game sends 2mbps, then 20mbps would be 10 times as many objects.
      - frollogaston 3mo ago
        That's what I'm asking, seems like this isn't a normal game, but what specifically about it makes the bandwidth requirement so high? I know RTSes send inputs instead of state, but that has its own drawbacks.
        gafferongames 3mo ago
        The space game has 1000 players. Most FPS games today have a maximum of 100 players. Let's assume these FPS games send 1mbps - 2mbps per-client (many send less, some send more) but it's a good range to start with. Now increase the player count from 100 to 1000. The number of objects that needs to be sent from server to client also 10Xs, because you need to send state for each player visible to each client, so that client can actually see the other players moving around. The end result is bandwidth is now approximately 10X what it was before, or 10-20mbps. To address your question around RTS and inputs. Game developers usually end up using state synchronization methods (sending the positions, rotations etc per-object) instead of relying on input based deterministic methods whatever player counts are high. My personal threshold is around 4 players. This is the reason FPS games and other higher player count games usually send state instead of just inputs. Because if they were to rely on a deterministic simulation synchronized only by inputs like an RTS, the server would have to wait for input from the the most lagged player before it could step the server simulation forward, and with regular internet jitter, packet loss and so on, as the player count increases it becomes more and more likely that the game will hitch and stutter waiting for these inputs. So the answer is, bandwidth sent per-client scales with the number of players in the game, and games with higher player counts tend to send state instead of just inputs for the reasons above. cheers
Stevvo 3mo ago
There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS. Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.
- dwroberts 3mo ago
  Although I agree it’s more like subsidising than democratising (and the price will just go back up eventually), the “just let players host it” is overly simplistic. There are tons of reasons to not do that - for example, companies and games that have not embraced modding do not want to be competing with modified/unofficial versions of their own games’ servers (as well as the cheating issue that can bring with it)
  - gafferongames 3mo ago
    Companies like https://nitrado.com https://nitrado.com host community servers cheaply and support mods. Sort of a nice half-way in between truly player hosted servers (where somebody could quit mid-game, or even cheat the game), and dedicated servers run only by the devs.
  - Stevvo 3mo ago
    I don't know if any of those "tons of reasons" are actually valid; checking the top 10 multiplayer games on Steam by player count all of them allow player hosted servers.
    - gafferongames 3mo ago
      Well, I can give several reasons why player hosted servers (like on their own machines) can be a bad idea: * If the server player quits, the game is over, or the game developer has to implement host migration, which generally sucks. Game developers would prefer to spend this money and time making the game more fun instead. * If the server player cooks a burrito in the microwave and is playing over wifi, maybe everybody's connection gets really bad for 60 seconds. * At least in the USA, internet connections are highly asymmetric. It's getting better now, but 10-20 years ago, the vast majority of players would only have enough bandwidth to send and receive one client's worth of bandwidth, and would not be able to upload bandwidth for all players, especially as player counts increased. * Cheating. The player hosting the server on their machine (if a PC) could modify code and/or memory to cheat. * Lag switching / network shaping. The player hosting the server could time out, lag out or ruin the experience for a player they don't like. * Host advantage. The final one is that the player hosting the server has zero lag, so has a huge advantage over other players. For a competitive game at least, it's much better in 2026 to host your servers somewhere secure, or to have player hosted servers in a secure provider that doesn't let players do any of the things above.
robviren 3mo ago
Give me self host code any day. This feels like the bait and switch AWS likes to pull. Would rather rely on the server in my dresser drawer than AWS for as much as I possibly can.
- simianwords 3mo ago
  this is painting a caricaturist view of AWS. they have been more or less stable with their prices and features. Their prices have mostly gone down ime. I have so far seen zero bait and switches and mostly things working as usual.
risingsubmarine 3mo ago
It's a trap.
cykros 3mo ago
The best thing that happened for multiplayer games is that kids came along that agreed that they didn't need developers to actually create games when all they really wanted was graphics and physics so they could be responsible both for buying the game and creating all of the "content" in it by interacting with each other.

20 points by gafferongames 3mo ago

I expect Amazon to change their pricing once they've established a foothold and makes me a bit wary to adopting it. Their other offerings are simply far too expensive which you will naturally reach out for.

dieselgate 3mo ago
Do know that you cannot trust Amazon.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  I can trust Amazon in general. Just not going to assume that something that costs them a lot will remain free for me to use.
  - gafferongames 3mo ago
    Maybe it doesn't cost them a lot, actually.

fivetenpen 3mo ago

Its free, until it’s not

iammjm 3mo ago

Would this also mean lower latency between two locations? One interesting case for me would be lowering latency in StarCraft: Brood War, which is cursed by having 90% of its player base in South Korea, with the rest of us foreigners spread all over the world.

gafferongames 3mo ago
The speed of light is not just a good idea, it's the law!

frollogaston 3mo ago

"This is because my space game sends a lot of bandwidth. 10-20 megabits per-second per-client" What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.

gafferongames 3mo ago
Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.
- JohnMakin 3mo ago
  You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?
  - gafferongames 3mo ago
    If a normal game sends 2mbps, then 20mbps would be 10 times as many objects.
    - frollogaston 3mo ago
      That's what I'm asking, seems like this isn't a normal game, but what specifically about it makes the bandwidth requirement so high? I know RTSes send inputs instead of state, but that has its own drawbacks.
      - gafferongames 3mo ago
        The space game has 1000 players. Most FPS games today have a maximum of 100 players. Let's assume these FPS games send 1mbps - 2mbps per-client (many send less, some send more) but it's a good range to start with. Now increase the player count from 100 to 1000. The number of objects that needs to be sent from server to client also 10Xs, because you need to send state for each player visible to each client, so that client can actually see the other players moving around. The end result is bandwidth is now approximately 10X what it was before, or 10-20mbps. To address your question around RTS and inputs. Game developers usually end up using state synchronization methods (sending the positions, rotations etc per-object) instead of relying on input based deterministic methods whatever player counts are high. My personal threshold is around 4 players. This is the reason FPS games and other higher player count games usually send state instead of just inputs. Because if they were to rely on a deterministic simulation synchronized only by inputs like an RTS, the server would have to wait for input from the the most lagged player before it could step the server simulation forward, and with regular internet jitter, packet loss and so on, as the player count increases it becomes more and more likely that the game will hitch and stutter waiting for these inputs. So the answer is, bandwidth sent per-client scales with the number of players in the game, and games with higher player counts tend to send state instead of just inputs for the reasons above. cheers

Stevvo 3mo ago

There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS. Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.

dwroberts 3mo ago
Although I agree it’s more like subsidising than democratising (and the price will just go back up eventually), the “just let players host it” is overly simplistic. There are tons of reasons to not do that - for example, companies and games that have not embraced modding do not want to be competing with modified/unofficial versions of their own games’ servers (as well as the cheating issue that can bring with it)
- gafferongames 3mo ago
  Companies like https://nitrado.com https://nitrado.com host community servers cheaply and support mods. Sort of a nice half-way in between truly player hosted servers (where somebody could quit mid-game, or even cheat the game), and dedicated servers run only by the devs.
- Stevvo 3mo ago
  I don't know if any of those "tons of reasons" are actually valid; checking the top 10 multiplayer games on Steam by player count all of them allow player hosted servers.
  - gafferongames 3mo ago
    Well, I can give several reasons why player hosted servers (like on their own machines) can be a bad idea: * If the server player quits, the game is over, or the game developer has to implement host migration, which generally sucks. Game developers would prefer to spend this money and time making the game more fun instead. * If the server player cooks a burrito in the microwave and is playing over wifi, maybe everybody's connection gets really bad for 60 seconds. * At least in the USA, internet connections are highly asymmetric. It's getting better now, but 10-20 years ago, the vast majority of players would only have enough bandwidth to send and receive one client's worth of bandwidth, and would not be able to upload bandwidth for all players, especially as player counts increased. * Cheating. The player hosting the server on their machine (if a PC) could modify code and/or memory to cheat. * Lag switching / network shaping. The player hosting the server could time out, lag out or ruin the experience for a player they don't like. * Host advantage. The final one is that the player hosting the server has zero lag, so has a huge advantage over other players. For a competitive game at least, it's much better in 2026 to host your servers somewhere secure, or to have player hosted servers in a secure provider that doesn't let players do any of the things above.

robviren 3mo ago

Give me self host code any day. This feels like the bait and switch AWS likes to pull. Would rather rely on the server in my dresser drawer than AWS for as much as I possibly can.

simianwords 3mo ago
this is painting a caricaturist view of AWS. they have been more or less stable with their prices and features. Their prices have mostly gone down ime. I have so far seen zero bait and switches and mostly things working as usual.

risingsubmarine 3mo ago

It's a trap.

cykros 3mo ago

The best thing that happened for multiplayer games is that kids came along that agreed that they didn't need developers to actually create games when all they really wanted was graphics and physics so they could be responsible both for buying the game and creating all of the "content" in it by interacting with each other.