Mediator: a design framework for P2P MMOGs
Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
RTF: a real-time framework for developing scalable multiplayer online games
Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Network and system support for games
Robust resource allocation in a massive multiplayer online gaming environment
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
Prediction-based real-time resource provisioning for massively multiplayer online games
Future Generation Computer Systems
Geelix LiveGames: remote playing of video games
CCNC'09 Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Conference on Consumer Communications and Networking Conference
Peer-to-peer architecture for real-time strategy MMOGs with intelligent cheater detection
Proceedings of the 3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques
The impact of virtualization on the performance of Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Proceedings of the 8th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
Is Server Consolidation Beneficial to MMORPG? A Case Study of World of Warcraft
CLOUD '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing
Euro-Par'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Parallel processing
Dynamic Resource Provisioning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Flexible load distribution for hybrid distributed virtual environments
Future Generation Computer Systems
SLA-based operation of massively multiplayer online games in competition-based environments
Proceedings of the International C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering
Autonomous massively multiplayer online game operation on unreliable resources
Proceedings of the International C* Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering
Autonomic operation of massively multiplayer online games in clouds
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM Cloud and Autonomic Computing Conference
Massively multiplayer online games on unreliable resources
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
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Today, highly successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have millions of registered users and hundreds of thousands of active concurrent players. To sustain their highly variable load, game operators over-provision a large static infrastructure capable of sustaining the game peak load, even though a large portion of the resources is unused most of the time. This inefficient resource utilisation has negative economic impacts by preventing any but the largest hosting centres from joining the market and dramatically increases prices. In this paper, we propose a new business model of hosting and operating MMOGs based on Cloud computing principles involving four actors: resource provider, game operator, game provider, and client. Our model efficiently provisions on-demand virtualised resources to game sessions based on their dynamic client load, which dramatically decreases prices and gives small and medium enterprises the opportunity of joining the market through zero initial investment. We validate our new model and its underlying business relationships through trace-based simulations utilising six months worth of monitoring data from a real-life MMOG using emulated resources from 16 of the largest Cloud resource providers currently on the market. We demonstrate that our model can operate state-of-the-art MMOGs with an average monthly gross profit of nearly $6 million excluding game purchase prices, overheads and taxation, while being able to maintain and control the QoS offered to all clients. Finally, we show how our approach is capable of operating next generation very highly interactive MMOGs with a small increase of 5.8% in the subscription price.