Sun Claims They Make Worlds Biggest MMO

Next Generation has a piece up examining Sun's claim that they develop the worlds largest Massive game: the stock market. They also go into some detail about Sun's actual MMOG middleware, Sun Gaming Server. From the article: "I argue that we've been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It's Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they're almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we've done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else."

Comments

Hmmm

[Otter]

The article is actually pretty interesting, and worth reading as the completely-missing-the-point summary here doesn't do it justice.

I don't, though, buy:

It's like saying television programming cannibalizes each other which is why we only had four television networks. Well cable came on the scene and we now have 250+ channels of programming that blew a hole right into the side of that market space. You could say that most of those channels are crap, but there's an audience for every single one of those channels. I don't think the people running Home & Garden Network are in any way cannibalizing the Sci Fi channel's audience.

Is he kidding? Of course cable channels have cannibalized the broadcast networks! The 250th channel may not be taking viewers from the 249th, but channels 5-250 sure as hell took viewers from 1-4!

utility

[ameoba]

We believe in order for the online multiplayer game space to really flourish, we have to start moving toward a utility model for online computing

Yes, we know just how successful Sun has been at promoting computing as a utility...

Re:Scary

[dasunt]

First off, the usual disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser.

That being said, one of the more productive strategies in stocks seems to be holding stocks for long periods of time. This is looking at the long term, not the short term. Can MMO players, used to instant gratification, understand that sometimes their investment fluctuates in value?

The stock market would be equivalent to a game where all NPCs give a range of XP: Sometimes its negative, sometimes its positive. Some NPCs give a negative net XP. Some NPCs give a positive net XP. The XP (negative or positive) is highly dependant on the amount of XP you have. Have more XP, and you get more XP (or lose more XP). Of course, whenever you leave the zone, you get hit with a capital gains tax. :p

Now that I think about it, that would be an interesting experiment to run on a MMO.

Not really about the stock market

[esampson]

From reading the article it looks like what Sun is talking about is making a server solution to handle all the transactions that occur in your typical MMO. Transactions, in this case, doesn't simply mean the player economy, however. When a player moves the client tells the server the player has moved from point A to point B which is validated by the server. When the player kills a mob the game gives them XP. When a player chats the client sends a message to the server and then the server sends messages out to all clients close enough in VR space to 'hear' the player. These are all examples of transactions with the servers.

The reason Sun talks about the stock market is because like an MMO the stock market has massive amounts of transactions that occur in real time. Unlike games, however, it's a lot more critical to get the transactions right. If you think duping can screw up a game imagine what it would do to the world economy, and I would imagine that it is simply unacceptable for the stock market servers to crash and have all the transactions for the past 15 minutes 'rolled back' when they reboot (for that matter it's probably unacceptable for the entire system to go down in the first place, so when a transaction server crashes other systems have to pick up without the end users ever knowing anything happened).

As a result the transaction servers developed by Sun are leaps and bounds beyond what MMOs are using. Sun is saying it can bring that expertise to developers, saving them from the expense of coding their own, usually inferior, transaction servers.

Of course a lot of this is me reading between the lines. It seems like the author of the article himself doesn't really grasp what it is that Sun is saying, but maybe the truth is that I am reading way too much into things.