[EarthLaunch]

I'm a game developer bootstrapping an Erlang-based game server that attempts this.

You don't have to send 48 bytes each frame (you can usually send only delta), and 30/sec is only necessary in a reaction-based FPS type of game. Hosting players in a local area, local meaning they can see each other and interact, is n^2. My calculations a year ago came up with a per-minute cost for the amount of AWS hardware it would require to host 1,000 and 10,000 'local' players. Basically, it wouldn't be affordable to have a huge gathering/battle more than a few times a month. It would be VERY expensive. Plus, each player has to have enough download bandwidth.

This type of thing will definitely happen in the future. Clustering is still in its infancy, and it's picking up steam. And there are smart optimizations to be made, such as sending more frequent data about nearer players. You can also design around it by not making players usually local to each other even though there is a single seamless game world. I'm doing that.

[jiggy2011]

Is AWS feasible for large scale game hosting? I would have thought co-location would be much more economical in this case.

[EarthLaunch]

AWS has lower upfront cost, doesn't require hardware management, and it's easier to provision consistent servers during growth or temporary peaks. Ideal for an unstable clustered system being run by a startup.

I'm mainly talking about EC2, since some other offerings aren't suitable for responsive games. I tried a SimpleDB backend to be hip a couple years back, but it has latency and designed failure rates that are impossible.

[jiggy2011]

I haven't done the math but I'm guessing that with a popular game the costs of hardware and hiring someone to do server management would be wiped out by EC2 costs pretty quickly.

Not sure how spikey game traffic is, but it would seem unlikely that your game is super popular for a day and then drops right off the next as would be the case for many websites.

For example if your game business model is charging some nominal fee per month (say $10) you might find that heavy players can burn through way more than $10 worth of EC2 traffic in a month.

Anyone know if any popular games are hosted on EC2?

[thejosh]

Doesn't Sony Japan or Amiga Japan use EC2 for their Playstation 3 servers?

[jiggy2011]

Not sure, though I think the Sony servers are simply used for matchmaking and authentication services and do not actually host most of the games themselves, that is delegated to consoles.