cost question
- Thread starter kain666
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Retail website anything from £5 a month to £500k per month depending on whether you'd just starting out or whether you'd hoping to be the next amazon. 
MMORPG with 2 million players is more interesting. If you go for a sharded set up, you can split players across servers (or a cluster of servers) and balance the load pretty easily. This way you can scale pretty linearly (the cost is just directly proportional to the number of players you have). The alternative and much more complex is something like Eve Online which because every player occupies the exact same game world interacting with each other, requires some serious hardware to handle the amount of data and interactions being thrown about. Some interactions on the database need to be atomic which means you need a massive amount of very very fast storage to store the data, which basically means using RAMSANs.
MMORPG with 2 million players is more interesting. If you go for a sharded set up, you can split players across servers (or a cluster of servers) and balance the load pretty easily. This way you can scale pretty linearly (the cost is just directly proportional to the number of players you have). The alternative and much more complex is something like Eve Online which because every player occupies the exact same game world interacting with each other, requires some serious hardware to handle the amount of data and interactions being thrown about. Some interactions on the database need to be atomic which means you need a massive amount of very very fast storage to store the data, which basically means using RAMSANs.
would that just be hardware?
I'd say server cost for eve might even match WOW.
As the beauty of wow, and how it's been around so long, is building a game interface off spreadsheets and data tables. And as a developer you appreciate the algebra and ridiculously huge databases, the engine on the other hand, doesn't strain the server at all (I'd think) as once the variables and data is passed through (strings of numbers and letters) it's left for you pre-downloaded software, to communicate models/textures to your hardware and fill in the variables with your stats/monster stats.
As for eve, it's almost identical, although streamed each and every time. (I've never played, but assume it's not cached etc)
Finally, cost? Erm. Haven't a clue. I'd assume that if you need a dual-quad core to crunch the numbers client end, you're going to need a ridiculous amount of processor power to crunch server side numbers + client responses, with a 60milli second latency to maintain a fast dynamic play style, that's a hell of a lot of work that most likely has been encrypted into one long string of numbers split by separators and read as one calculation.
I blabber. But that's how I'd go about it..
As the beauty of wow, and how it's been around so long, is building a game interface off spreadsheets and data tables. And as a developer you appreciate the algebra and ridiculously huge databases, the engine on the other hand, doesn't strain the server at all (I'd think) as once the variables and data is passed through (strings of numbers and letters) it's left for you pre-downloaded software, to communicate models/textures to your hardware and fill in the variables with your stats/monster stats.
As for eve, it's almost identical, although streamed each and every time. (I've never played, but assume it's not cached etc)
Finally, cost? Erm. Haven't a clue. I'd assume that if you need a dual-quad core to crunch the numbers client end, you're going to need a ridiculous amount of processor power to crunch server side numbers + client responses, with a 60milli second latency to maintain a fast dynamic play style, that's a hell of a lot of work that most likely has been encrypted into one long string of numbers split by separators and read as one calculation.
I blabber. But that's how I'd go about it..
Sounds like a homework question to me. A good one mind, not your normal I have 15k to spend on a gaming machine....
As the others have said your talking a lot of hardware to host a MMO of WOW scale, and when I say a lot of hardware I mean huge amounts. Wow for example uses 10 datacenters, infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM, not to mention the 1.3 petabytes of disk space required for I/O ops. Thats without the bandwith, load balancing, firewalls, routing kit, well the list goes on.
To put a price on this kind of hardware is almost imposible but if I was to say several million £ plus then were heading in the right direction.
for some other info about the wow infrastrusture take a look at this link
Also to put some kind of figures to the numbers for you, I have 2 machines in a uk based rackspace datacenter, both are quad core, raid 5, 8gb ram with datacenter grade routing and firewall kit, (the equivilant of about 1 of those 13,250 wow nodes) for these I pay about £1500 pcm, so about 600 per machine. Scale that up 13,250 times, and remove say 1000 nodes for scale and your in the right ball park. The figure I come out with is around £7,350,000 per month to run the infrastructure. This is best guess stuff but as you can see this is serious money, serious investment and very serious business.
As I said this is very much guess work to try and put some semi sensible figures on these kind of hardware numbers but you start to see just how big an operation something like an MMO is.
As the others have said your talking a lot of hardware to host a MMO of WOW scale, and when I say a lot of hardware I mean huge amounts. Wow for example uses 10 datacenters, infrastructure includes 13,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM, not to mention the 1.3 petabytes of disk space required for I/O ops. Thats without the bandwith, load balancing, firewalls, routing kit, well the list goes on.
To put a price on this kind of hardware is almost imposible but if I was to say several million £ plus then were heading in the right direction.
for some other info about the wow infrastrusture take a look at this link
Also to put some kind of figures to the numbers for you, I have 2 machines in a uk based rackspace datacenter, both are quad core, raid 5, 8gb ram with datacenter grade routing and firewall kit, (the equivilant of about 1 of those 13,250 wow nodes) for these I pay about £1500 pcm, so about 600 per machine. Scale that up 13,250 times, and remove say 1000 nodes for scale and your in the right ball park. The figure I come out with is around £7,350,000 per month to run the infrastructure. This is best guess stuff but as you can see this is serious money, serious investment and very serious business.
As I said this is very much guess work to try and put some semi sensible figures on these kind of hardware numbers but you start to see just how big an operation something like an MMO is.
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IIRC the Eve Online shard runs on a couple of racks worth of IBM HS and LS blades with lots of disk and a couple of RAMSans. Certainly expensive, but not the racks and racks in a datacentre that you might imagine.
In many ways, it is 'just' a large client/server app hosting 60,000 concurrent sessions. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in your client.
In many ways, it is 'just' a large client/server app hosting 60,000 concurrent sessions. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in your client.
according to this article eve is certainly a much smaller opperation than WOW.
330,000 subscribers in comparison to 11.5 million for WOW.
330,000 subscribers in comparison to 11.5 million for WOW.
The main issue with Eve is that *everyone* is interacting with the same database, which makes it more and more difficult to scale upwards. (The cost starts to become exponential)
With WoW, every x thousand users are just placed on a different shard. (The cost scales linearly)
With WoW, every x thousand users are just placed on a different shard. (The cost scales linearly)
um the cost of hardware for the 2 things i specified lol
Can I ask for what reason? Are you looking at starting some kind of mmo?
Being able to personally finance a mmo might be a little bit out of scope for the large majority of people, finding investment is not going to be easy either.
A simple retail website depending on transactions can be massively cheap, a few hundred a month for serious hosting but as daz said it can be started on a shoe string budget
Nobody is going to be able to give you exacts unless you know some kind of traffic figures and number of transactions etc.
Being able to personally finance a mmo might be a little bit out of scope for the large majority of people, finding investment is not going to be easy either.
A simple retail website depending on transactions can be massively cheap, a few hundred a month for serious hosting but as daz said it can be started on a shoe string budget
Nobody is going to be able to give you exacts unless you know some kind of traffic figures and number of transactions etc.
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Put it this way, I've ran some minor web based MMO's from free servers. Solely PHP and MySQL. As long as your page isn't too image heavy it can be done with a reasonable userbase. I had 1400 registered users. Over 3 servers. All able to communicate and interact.
That project put me in the mindset of minimizing server side code. Quing for outputting ONE long string, which you disect and hand over to javascript/html for line by line outputting (imitating a fight scene).
As mentioned, look at WOW as multiple mirrored servers. They struggle as it is with multiple servers, if you try and group 500+ players together, casting CPU heavy spells (Area of effect etc) ithe server takes a huge toll and DC's people. Similar to a DDoS web attack. Interesting thread.
That project put me in the mindset of minimizing server side code. Quing for outputting ONE long string, which you disect and hand over to javascript/html for line by line outputting (imitating a fight scene).
As mentioned, look at WOW as multiple mirrored servers. They struggle as it is with multiple servers, if you try and group 500+ players together, casting CPU heavy spells (Area of effect etc) ithe server takes a huge toll and DC's people. Similar to a DDoS web attack. Interesting thread.