Questions About Wish Game that are using Ice

[greysnake]

I see these introducations in the mutablerealms team's homepage:

Wish is the first Ultra Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (UMMORPG™). "Ultra" means that Wish supports more than 10,000 simultaneous players in a single, seamless world, without any zones or "shards".

And also the Hardware Architecture introductions found in their homepage

Wish runs on a high-performance server cluster from RackSaver (see the press release). Our cluster has 88 nodes, each with two Xeon CPUs, totaling 176 Xeon CPUs. All nodes are connected over gigabit ethernet. The software infrastructure to run our cluster is provided by Ice, a cutting-edge communications middleware from ZeroC.

Wish supports true Ultra Massive Online Gaming with more than 10,000 simultaneous players on a single, zone-free server.


you can see here: mutablerealms

Wish is a great game base on the ICE, and it can support 10,000 simultaneous players on a single world. But they need so many servers,that will cost too much . Is that worth ?
If 176 Xeon CPUS can support 10,000, that really a big problem.

I am confused.

[greysnake]

It's really a very hard problem .

[marc]

I'm sorry, but this is not really the forum to discuss Mutable Realms' technology. This is proprietary technology, of which we cannot disclose any details.

[greysnake]

I just ask here only for that I can not disscuss in Wish Game forum.
I am very interested in the network technology that are using ice.
For I wanna writting MMORPG on the Ice technology .
Sorry for that .

Thank you .

[Ken Carpenter]

Hi greysnake,

Let's do some simple math with rough numbers.

Let's say that each server runs around $5,000.

88 x $5,000 = $440,000 (a one-time capital cost)

Let's say that the game sells at retail for $50. Of that, let's say that only $10 is profit.

10,000 x $100,000 from sale of game CDs

That brings the cost down to $340,000

Let's say that each user pays $10/month

10,000 x $10 = $100,000/month

Obviously this doesn't factor in the support costs and bandwidth, etc., but you can see that within around 4 months, the costs of the servers can be recovered. After that, it's all gravy baby!

Furthermore, since any popular MMOG will have many more than 10,000 players, we can repeat this $440,000 investment multiple times to make even more money.

Sounds like a deal to me!

[marc]

Actually, the cost of the server is much less than in your calculation (about half). Also, for only 10,000 total subscribers, you wouldn't need such a massive server. Typically you have a 1 to 10 (or 1 to 5 in peak times) relationship of concurrent users to subscribers.