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

what you hear on the floor

[darkmayo]

WTS [DOW Jones Stock] PLS SEND TELL!!!!11

I'll go with it.

[torchdragon]

I suppose that's a fair statement. Wall Street has its fair share of Min-Maxers, Power Gamers, and Exploiters all the same. The Broadcast and Trade channels are full of people trying to rip off the casual players. And most people are throwing away money every month for the ability to waste time and energy on a world that doesn't exist. Yeah, I'll agree with that statement.

Rated M

[LoverOfJoy]

And often, when you lose at the game, you commit suicide. Rated M!

It's true

[oni]

I've played a lot of Stock Market. The end guy is hard

Re:It's true

[DarthVeda]

have you tried the insider-trading combo?

Re:It's true

[djdavetrouble]

No, thats the one where the giant gorilla comes out and throws barrels of overpriced crude oil at you.

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.