Would MMOs Wither Without Net Neutrality?

Is Net neutrality critical to the rapid growth of MMORPG online games? Ramprate believes it is, and outlines its thinking in an article titled Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills A Night Elf. The article’s premise - that ISPs who get no direct revenue from online gaming would handle MMO and FPS (game server) traffic in a fashion that would degrade latency - is being discussed on Slashdot.

While there’s a certain logic to some of the scenarios presented by Ramprate regarding phone companies and ISPs, bear in mind that the largest online games are actually hosted by a phone company. AT&T hosts World of Warcraft and Sony Online Entertainment’s major games. At this year’s E3, AT&T announced the expansion of its online gaming operation. Given the hosting fees coming in from Blizzard and Sony, it’s reasonable to conclude that AT&T/SBC has a vested interest in their success. Does the nation’s largest phone company have leverage in dealing with ISPs who might be tempted to mess with their customers’ MMO traffic? I suspect they do. I’d be interested in comments/feedback on the Ramprate scenario and whether AT&T’s hosting role supports or undermines it.

MMO Game Host Deploys 1,000 Blade Servers

Multiplayer online game host Online Game Services Inc. (OGSi) has deployed more than 1,000 IBM BladeCenter servers at 365 Main’s flagship data center in San Francisco, the companies announced today. OGSi, the gaming channel of managed services provider Global Netoptex Inc. (GNi), says it already has more than 1 million users, with clients including (GoPets Ltd.) and Ping0 LLC, which will distribute the online component to Hellgate: London.

OGSi has invested over five years and more than $20 million in its network infrastructure. The servers installed at 365 Main include a mix of IBM LS20 (AMD-based), HS20 and HS21 (Intel-based), and JS20 (PowerPC-based) blades, and represent the single largest deployment of IBM blade servers in the digital entertainment industry, according to OGSi. The company says it expects to have more than 3,500 blade servers operational by the end of 2007.

“Our on-demand ‘pay-as-you-grow’ game hosting business model is based around a dense hosting environment that requires advanced, modern data centers like 365 Main’s,” said James Hursthouse, CEO and owner of OGSi. “We chose 365 Main because it offers world-class power, connectivity, cooling and security, which together allow us to provide our customers with the finest hosting infrastructure available to power their games.”

Online Game Services Inc. launched in June 2004, and is providing online game companies with fully managed dedicated game hosting services, eliminating the need for MMORPG operators to spend millions of dollars on web infrastructure. “It’s a drastic reduction in risk and cost,” said Hursthouse, who said the MMO sector is growing quickly due to the success of World of Warcraft and strong media interest in Second Life. “There definitely has been a paradigm shift. Right now there aren’t many publishers that aren’t looking at MMOs.”

Rackspace to Host MLG Pro Gaming

Managed hosting provider Rackspace will provide web hosting for Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the leading competitive gaming leagues, the company said this week. MLG said it chose Rackspace for its “enterprise-class infrastructure and global hosting provider with digital media expertise” with scalability capacity to keep up with their growth.

“We have hundreds of thousands of registered users who want their MLG content on demand, so we’ve got a lot riding on the availability of our infrastructure,” explained Paul Sullivan, MLG’s Vice President of Product Development. “Rackspace has been essential in prescribing the appropriate technology architecture for our expanding IT needs. Their technical expertise and 100 percent network uptime guarantee have been instrumental as we prepare for a global expansion of our league.”

Bandwidth Exchange Powers Gaming Network

One of the trends we’ve tracked here at Data Center Knowledge is the growth of online gaming and its potential to create demand for data center services. While much of our coverage has focused on the MMORPG sector, there’s also growth in the market for multi-player game servers and game hosting. An example is today’s announcement that Progression Networks will use the meet-me room of the Bandwidth Exchange in St. Louis to enhance network connectivity for its GameRail Network.

GameRail operates a high speed network that directly connects online game players to the servers that host the most popular and demanding titles. By deploying with a unique network peering approach to ISPs, universities and game server providers (GSPs), GameRail is able to deliver superior performance to its subscribers. Low latency (”lag”) is crucial in multiplayer first-person shooter games like CounterStrike, where a slow connection can much up gameplay and/or leave a player at a competitive disadvantage. The service, which is free during its current beta period, eventually plans to charge $15 a month for subscribers.

“Because of the Peering opportunities with the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings’ existing clients, we are able to fast start our network and also provide superior performance for our peer’s online gaming subscribers,” said GameRail’s CEO Blake Ashby. “Turning up in a carrier hotel like the Bandwidth Exchange Buildings also give us rapid access to leading carriers to build a national network.”

EVE Online: 30,000 Users on One Server Shard

CCP Games says it has assembled the largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the online gaming industry for EVE Online, the growing science fiction MMORPG. EVE Online recently hosted 30,000 concurrent users on a single shard - which CCP says is a world record - and now manages more than 150 million database transactions per day.

The game runs on a cluster featuring dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers with additional enhancements to the clusters internet backbone. The database servers don’t use traditional hard drives but instead Solid State Disks (SSD) which can handle over 400,000 random I/Os per second.

“The sharp growth rate of EVE Online was pushing the limits of the technology we replaced,” said Hilmar Veigar P

Second Life and the Scalability of Online Games

The virtual world Second Life has been the beneficiary of extraordinary buzz lately. The MMORPG has had been featured in a Business Week cover story as well as favorable coverage from influential blogs. As Second Life wins fans and users, can its infrastructure scale along with its audience?

That’s what News.com is wondering in a story that looks at the backend of Second Life, in terms of both its technology and business model. Second Life differs from traditional MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest, which run copies of the same “virtual world” on hundreds of servers, with each environment known as a “realm.” Second Life operates as a grid, with different components of its environment spread across multiple servers. Here’s an excerpt from the News.com story:

“Second Life” currently runs on 2,579 servers that use the dual-core Opteron chip produced by AMD. Each server is responsible for an individual “sim,” or 16 acres of virtual “Second Life” land. At peak usage that means that each server is handling about three users. “Most (massively multiplayer online games) have hundreds to thousands of players per server machine,” said Michael Sellers, who runs Online Alchemy, a provider of artificial-intelligence tools for online games. “Is there a way they can achieve (significant) elements of scale? I haven’t seen that.”

Some observers of virtual worlds see challenges for Second Life as it scales beyond its current structure - which has a very low ratio of users to servers - and seeks to accommodate more users. Retaining that server-to-user ratio would be expensive.

Data Center Move Stalls World of Warcraft

Data center moves are making all the wrong kinds of news this month. The latest incident affected the European version of World of Warcraft, the world’s largest online virtual world, which had 30 game servers offline for  an extended period during a facility transfer. The WoW Insider blog describes the scene: “The forums are full of extremely angry users, tempers are running high, and the few people I did manage to speak to ingame were all creating new characters and furious that they couldn’t access their normal servers.”

While it might seem like a small matter for gamers to lose access to an online game for a day or so, the fact of the matter is that virtual worlds are becoming an important business, both in size and financial impact. World of Warcraft has more than 5 million paying members who pony up $12 to $15 a month to play. These games can require hundreds of servers (or “realms” in gamer speak), so there’s some pretty serious data center infrastructure supporting the operation. Everquest requires 1,500 servers, for example.

Virtual worlds are yet another fast-growing form of digital entertainment that will contribute to demand for data center infrastructure, and we’ll be tracking this sector’s growth and requirements going forward.

Steam: 10 Million Gigabytes of Traffic in 2005

Valve Software’s Steam system has become a force in online gaming, providing the platform for Half Life 2, Counter Strike and other popular games. In a year-end update, the Steam team shares some mind-boggling traffic and bandwidth statistics, with comparative illustrations:

Steam has delivered approximately 10 million gigabytes of data since the first of the year. You could fill 125,000 80 GB hard drives with this data to make a line over 11 miles long. Not that you would want to, but the visual helps. There have been a total of 50 billion player minutes in our multiplayer games since the start of the year. If a single person sat down to play on their own, it would take 2.28 million years to accomplish this. This is assuming that you’re not planning on sleeping during this 2 million year stretch.

How do they manage that load? Steam uses Limelight Networks for content distribution. Limelight offers a specialized solution for online gaming companies.