Originally posted by Arantor:

Interestingly, I had been in another presentation this week at Develop Brighton about cloud facilities for games; it's quite feasible to run even complex networking for surprisingly low prices these days - there's an example in the presentation of an upcoming MMO that can support 100k users on a server instance for £75/hour. That might sound a lot (in the region of £60k/month) but you only need those 100k users to pay £1 to more than cover the hosting costs.

It's really not quite the enormous leviathan of a deal to run even large scale.

The trouble isn't in the cost but in the coding involved to get the results you expect. It's one thing to set up a server to handle sharing files or hosting email. It's another to handle the necessary communication between networked devices running a concurrent rts, regularly saving game state data for Homeworld, and handling authentication and authorization of accounts. All of that has to be custom coded for Godus in order for it to work. Additionally, the servers have to have specific "Godus" software written to process that information, update databases, and send out state changes.

Plus, that's just half of the equation. The client application needs to be well-written as well to gracefully send and receive the data its given. None of this has a representation at this point in Godus as it's been released. These are issues that have to be resolved on top of all the issues that exist as it currently stands. If Godus running locally has severe issues, adding network communication is only going to make things worse.

That's just it, this stuff is already being packaged up by vendors either partly or completely ready to go. There is an entire industry in start-up right now - the so-called game-service-providers, pitching Games-as-a-Service.

Folks like GameSparks and Brisk, they've got various toolchains available for auth, data storage, state management, and a bunch of other stuff that can be deployed with relative ease on platforms like Azure or AWS. MMO server services are practically commoditised and with the growth of 'social gameplay', it's becoming increasingly competitive, driving the costs down.

While yes there is a certain amount of client specific work, we're not talking the complete server stack from scratch, but increasingly componentised commodity stuff. It's crazy.

Going slightly off topic but there's been active demonstrations of hybridising workload. We've never seen significant destructable terrain in 3D games simply because of the physics workload. One of the tech demos showed a building being repeatedly hit with a rocket launcher to simulate destructable terrain with an increasing physics workload. At idle, the demo was showing a consistent 30 FPS, hovering at 29-30 at the first round of rockets went off, increasing physics modelling to a couple of thousand objects. As the terrain was increasingly demolished the physics workload went up; by the time it hit something on the order of physics modelling of 35k objects or so, it was grinding at 2-3 FPS.

The demoed solution: model the physics on a server. Same scenario was demonstrated with a consistent 32 FPS when the endpoint only had to model the meshes in GPU hardware, leaving the physics handling to a server. Yes, it's a tech demo but it's interesting to see the directions they're going - and increasingly that's pointing to offloading work to an elastic scaling compute cloud. Microsoft, of course, were talking up Azure, but the principle would hold for AWS.

I found myself amazed at how pervasive the traditional mindsets are on this stuff - in which I included myself. This stuff is only going to get easier and cheaper to deploy and only the fringe cases with truly experimental behaviour is going to need customisation and tooling. I don't at a glance see anything that Godus would require especially custom tooling compared to the stuff being talked up as commodity.

It might be becoming easier to deploy, but who wants to actually use that? I don't have a single MMO game. I don't have anything on cloud storage, and I cringe every time I play Diablo 3 and have to hope my internet connection doesn't hick up.

It takes one time for someone to lose their photo albums, ruin hours or weeks of play (save game), or not be able to play a game they paid for to start despising the idea of cloud and server based computing.

A company I worked for has specifically forbid the use of cloud based services, storage and back up for security, longevity and relaiability reasons. It takes one hick up to wipe out / lose data or for that data to be compromised.

Nothing is more secure or reliable than a locally run game on your own computer, with weekly / monthly hard drive back ups to a portable drive. Nothing. Not to mention you can play that game whenever you like, regardless if the company that made that game is still in business or not, and if you have internet access or not. In today's sense when publishers push the idea that you don't own the game you bought, I subscribe to the idea that ownership is possession. I bought it, I saved it, I backed it up and I can play it whenever I want. I don't want to shell out $1, $20 or $60 on a game I might not be able to play 5 years down the line.

Not to mention that all of the free to play, invest to play, pay to play games are server / cloud based. There's not a single person who will continue to play that same game 5 years down the line. The only way those games survive is by "churning" for new customers over and over again. For all intents and purposes, it's a disposable product and is rightly called a cash grab. It carries no value, and when you spend $5 or $20 in that in-game shop, it's money you have literally thrown away. I can still install and play Civilization, or S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Starcraft you name it. Do you think the same can be said for Godus or any free to play game 5 or 10 years down the line, or any game that runs off of servers and cloud services? There are a few that still maintain their multiplayer / MMO components 5 years after release, but those are a rarity. When I install old games that had match making services or other on-line components, I have yet to find one that maintained those services 5 years after release. That speaks volumes about how disposable online / cloud games are.

People can jump on the server / cloud band wagon, but once a wheel falls of and they realize this wagon isn't going anywhere, they will learn a hard and dissapointing lesson that the only people who benefitted from that game were the developer / publisher. The customer lost his hard earned money in the in-game shop, purchasing a disposable item, or a subscription that has vanished into thin air like steam.

Why should I continue to shell out monthly subscription fees, or spend money in an in-game shop buying limited use items to bypass roadblocks when I can fire up Black and White or any other real game and play to my heart's content.