Google and Ubisoft Are Teaming Up To Improve Online Multi-Player Video Games (fortune.com)

Google and Ubisoft announced on Tuesday they have a new project intended to improve the performance of fast-paced, online multi-player video games. From a report: The search giant said it teamed with Ubisoft -- the publisher of popular video games like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry -- to create a gaming developer framework intended for coders that work on online video games. The project is called Agones, which is Greek for "contest" or "gathering," and it will be available in open-source, meaning developers can use it for free and also contribute to the underlying technology. Google pitches Agones as a more cutting-edge way for developers to build multi-player games that don't crash or stutter when thousands of video gamers play at the same time.

Each time people want to play their favorite first-person shooter or other computer resource-heavy online video game with others, the underlying infrastructure that powers the online video game must create a special gaming server that hosts the players. The Agones framework was designed to more efficiently distribute the computing resources necessary to support each online gaming match, thus reducing the complexity of creating each special server while helping coders better track how the computing resources are being used.

Comments

It's official

[duke_cheetah2003]

I've said it previously, but this really hammers it home. GOOGLE IS EVIL. Pairing with a purveyor of super obnoxious DRM. Ewwwwwww. Ubisoft is disgusting. I won't play their games anymore, even ones I legitimately purchased.

Re:Exactly this

[EvilSS]

Outside of a few enclaves, there's little push to make games connected online. Those enclaves tend to be centered around large media companies.

Don't get me wrong, I've done plenty of multiplayer, but I don't like it exclusively. I'd rather the devs spend an extra six months polishing gameplay over polishing netcode. Or give the networking funds over to the story devs so I can have some of my in-game actions reflected meaningfully in the story. None of this pallet-swapped outfit or "moral compass" bull. Meaningful reflection.

You must be old, like me. Players in their 10's-20's don't care much for single player games anymore, it's all about online PvP (in whatever form that takes for any given genre) for the vast majority of them. Just look at the top grossing and top played games (including F2P games like LoL, Hearthstone, Fortnite BR, etc). All multiplayer. The last "Huge" single player game I can think of was Zelda BotW. Doom, Fallout 4 before that but none of those have any staying power with the general gaming public.

A nice game company should

[AHuxley]

Let users have access to their own offical servers all over the world while the game is enjoying sales.
When the game is no longer supported push an update to let people host the game, use p2p. A way to keep multi player working within a user community.
Pushing a big brand party political data mining ad company onto a game is just not useful branding.