6 ms·
One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
by pdubs 14y ago
One-time cost vs. ongoing cost for years to come? It's not as simple as you make it out to be.
- aviraldg 14y agoBest compromise: create a "local" version of the server.
- gknoy 14y agoI seem to recall that the reason for the cloud based server was to leverage more number crunching power to yield better AI. Running it locally might not help. (Though, it certainly is better than no server, and it'd be interesting if they let people tune the fidelity of the processing so that it could run locally, or on a private server.)
- baddox 14y agoI highly doubt they are providing server resources for every player that are more powerful than the player's desktop or laptop computer. Surely that would be extremely expensive.
- mctx 14y agoI agree - at a very low 100MHz per player that's 25 players to a 2.5GHz Xeon core, 100 per CPU, 200 per server. Assume 100,000 players, that's 500 decently spec'd servers plus redundancy, bandwidth, storage, sysadmins, etc.
- jiggy2011 14y agoYour probably right, but maybe if you are doing all the calculations for everyone in one place you can start to make large scale use of dynamic programming techniques over time?
- benologist 14y agoRight, and Diablo 3 was online-only to solve the problem of not being able to play with your friends. And I forget what the excuse was for Command & Conquer 4. It's just DRM first and foremost.
- johnward 14y agoyeah it. EA shuts down the servers when they are tired of paying for them. Game dies. Sim City get puts on madden schedule.
- estel 14y agoOr, slightly less cynically, demand is always orders of magnitude higher for the first week or two after release, so it's only a short term investment in servers if they can be merged later.
- johnward 14y agoThe point is at some point they could pull the plug. I still play older version of SimCity to this day.
- estel 14y agoSure they could. But if I get £40 of value from my game before they do, I can live with that. It's not ideal, but it doesn't make it a poor purchase.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI think there is a broader cultural loss though. In the future years when "study of video game history" becomes a thing, people will be able to examine and analyse old games like SimCity 2000 by actually playing them as they were. Since they have been archived and preserved by wide distribution. Then as you get further into the future maybe you start to come across games where you have to say "sadly the only existing copy of the server code was lost in the great github fire of 2020, so all we can show you is this archived footage".
- mmcnickle 14y ago> so all we can show you is this archived footage. You mean the tens of thousands of videos that will be posted. Historians will have no shortage of source material. I'd actually argue that the videos are more valuable as they show first hand how the game was played at the time. Think a recording of a long-forgotten instrument compared to the actual instrument, which is more valuable?