The best thing that has ever happened for multiplayer games | Hacker News Reader

The best thing that has ever happened for multiplayer games

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35 pointsgafferongames17 comments

I'm not fully up to scratch with the latest AWS tactics, but to me, this seems like another way to get people to move to their platform and then charge for bandwidth at a later date, ultimately trapping their consumers.

Also, this whole post just felt like a brag, i'm not surprised it barely got any upvotes

> Also, this whole post just felt like a brag, i'm not surprised it barely got any upvotes

Yeah, opening with:

> I'm a world expert in game netcode

Felt like an odd way to start the article.

Maybe OP is job farming?

He is one of the well known netcode guy.

But from the few interactions I had with him I would say he is quite abrasive, stubborn and probably somewhat on the spectrum.

But there is a special kind of unpleasantness in writing/debugging netcode for large projects, I don't think you can be agreeable and still you your job correctly.

If anything, in immature engineering organizations, preserving netcode invariants to successfully deliver a multiplayer project might benefit from a little of that disposition.

Agreed on the bragging.

Also I‘m not convinced about the whole cost issue. A nice server from a bare metal provider like OVH will be so much cheaper than the AWS equivalent, you can pay for a ton of traffic.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink

> this whole post just felt like a brag

And yet, everything I wrote in the article is true.

I operate a game:

https://slitherworld.com

When I started developing it, I wanted to use AWS game lift. But the costs proved I would be paying $1000s of dollars per month to meet the user demand. This makes me seriously reconsider.

If it involves Amazon today, it is overwhelmingly unlikely to be the best thing that has ever happened for anyone.

I have no knowledge in the field. But it would be nice if the article compared the raw prices of usual bare metal offering vs cloud because I am not sure it would support the claim that the egress would be the highest cost.

Of course it could be but a quantitative perspective for an average game would have been much better.

Before this change hosting a game with an average CCU of 100,000, with each client sending 1 Mbps would cost $1,650,791 per month in AWS data transfer egress fees at list price.

Obviously, nobody actually spent that. At scale people would negotiate better deals.

The reason why this is a big deal is that now small games, or studios who launch their first game and don't have any real clout yet can get a really good deal from AWS by default.

I think this will result in most new games electing to host in AWS Gamelift by default, due to the difficulty of procuring enough bare metal at launch on favorable terms

For example, working out how much bare metal and in which locations to order? It's really difficult to work out when you are launching a game and you don't know how successful the game will be.

Now studios can just scale elastically up/down at launch, find out their base load and maybe bare metal can beat it, or maybe not, but AWS is competitive now with bare metal for games, and easier to spin up and adjust your fleet, vs. old-school purchase by the month and 30 days notice to shut down bare metal :)

Ai probably didn't contribute to writing this, i think the article has that going for it lol

> Having completed all of this, I decided to leave. I had achieved all I wanted to and needed to work on something new. And frankly, I just really disliked working with Richard Baker.

Kind of a weird thing to drop in unless it's an inside joke? (:

Cool.

What about the rest of us who don’t play games or write them? When will AWS stop printing money with egress fees?

When Cloudflare breaks them?

Host on that instance type, maybe?

When you leave for the competition

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