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

https://mas-bandwidth.com/the-best-thing-thats-ever-happened-for-multiplayer-games/

by gafferongames • 22 days ago

20 92 22 days ago

zuzululu• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Do know that you cannot trust Amazon.

frollogaston11• 22 days 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.

fivetenpen• 22 days ago

Its free, until it’s not

iammjm• 22 days 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.

gafferongames39• 22 days ago

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

frollogaston11• 22 days 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.

gafferongames39• 22 days 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• 22 days 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?

thunderfork6• 22 days ago

Game data and video data have very different constraints. Depends on the nature of the game, of course, but with jitter and all that, video can just run a buffer and manage network conditions (more) trivially, but a game needs things to be a lot tighter to avoid gameplay-impacting desync

xnx• 22 days ago

Is there any reason that transmitted data would be much larger than player inputs (e.g. keystrokes and mouse movement)?

thunderfork6• 22 days ago

Yeah, this strikes me as strange. If you're sending that much data constantly, you're either syncing too much stuff too often, or you're not using compression when you should be (shout-out to Oodle)

Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients.

At the end of the day, you can only "democratize" while you have players, and performance constraints on end users aren't getting any looser

gafferongames39• 22 days ago

Maybe you can just be doing all the standard compression tricks, but still have a 10-20 times larger world? If so, why not?

gafferongames39• 22 days ago

Something that this article doesn't mention that's going to be a big constraint: each of your clients parsing 20mbps of updates is going to have a performance impact on those clients.

I can assure you that parsing 20 megabits per-second worth of packets on a client is not a significant CPU cost.

mvdtnz3• 22 days ago

It's a ludicrous amount of bandwidth even for a 1,000 player game, and a strong indicator that this developer is doing something very wrong.

avaer• 22 days ago

It's like someone saying their project repo has 10-20GB of source.

(btw game server network data is usually trivially and insanely compressible, far more than text)

10000truths• 22 days ago

It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons:

1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a small visible area.

2. Players are not the only entity that need to be synced. Every server-side entity affecting a client needs to have its state broadcast to that client. A dynamically destructible environment that physically interacts with players is a perfect example of this - launch a rocket at a building, compute the Voronoi fractures server-side based on impact location, sync thousands of pieces of flying concrete debris (each with its own rigid body) across all players.

Stevvo5• 22 days 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• 22 days 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)

gafferongames39• 22 days ago

Companies like 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.

Stevvo5• 22 days 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.

gafferongames39• 22 days ago

Hosting in AWS (or anywhere else) doesn't preclude you from doing the right thing and releasing your server binary or even source code after you shut your game down. For example, Knockout City by Velan Studios did exactly this.

https://knockoutcity.com/private-server-edition

robviren• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

It's a trap.

cykros• 19 days 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.

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

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