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Are Gaming Studios the Most Innovative Tech Companies Out There?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Computer games are big business, with millions of players and billions of dollars in revenue every year. But that popularity puts game studios in a tough spot, especially when it comes to mobile games that need to serve their players a constant stream of updates and rewards. That pressure is leading to an interesting phenomenon: while IT companies that create more 'serious' software (i.e., productivity apps, business tools, etc.) are often viewed as cutting edge, it might be game developers actually doing the most innovative stuff when it comes to analytics, cloud and high-performance computing, and so on. Broken Bulb Studios, Hothead Games, and some other studios (along with some hosting companies) talk about how they've built their platforms to handle immense (and fluctuating) demand from gamers."
No. At least not the big boys. Unless you call invasive DRM, sequel after sequel and shooter after shooter innovative.
I assumed the most innovative technology development, regardless of field, is in a military or university setting.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Some game companies do innovate, I don't want to take that away from them. But they're not coming up with new technologies most of the time. Stuff tends to appear in a technical paper before it ever appears in a game these days, maybe gets presented at siggraph or something even before anyone can put it into a commercial product.
"Tech" also covers a lot of ground. When you consider the complexity of what's going on in biotech, video games are a footnote.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've always said that an MMO is literally the most complicated piece of software one can make. Take every single problem that exists in software engineering, and you have it in an MMO.
A) Every problem from a normal game.
1) Resource streaming for an open world.
2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware
3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it's not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)
B) Every problem that a business app would have.
4) High availability clusters
5) Billing systems
6) Massive databases
7) Customer Support back end
8) Call center support
C) Every problem that 'internet companies' have
9) Latency kills
10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces
D) Some nice unique problems for MMOs only
11) Cross server object replication
12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.