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skullz writes:
"From engadget: A closer look at Titanfall's not-so-secret weapon: Microsoft's cloud
While you were busy running along walls and throwing missiles back at your opponents during the Titanfall beta, countless data centers across the world were making sure that each AI-controlled Titan bodyguard had your back. Much of the frenetic action in Respawn Entertainment's debut game rests on one thing: Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure.
Up until last November, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's baby was mostly used for business applications, like virtualization and acting as an enterprise-level email host. With the Xbox One, though, the company opened up its global server farms to game developers, giving them access to more computing power than could reasonably be stuffed into a $500 game console. Since the Xbox One's debut, Microsoft has been crowing about how Azure would let designers create gaming experiences players have never seen before. Now it's time for the product to speak for itself."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @01:14AM
Whatever happened to privately operated dedicated servers? Don't big corporate gaming corporations allow players to run their own servers anymore? Why do corporations hate freedom?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AnythingGoes on Tuesday March 11 2014, @01:48AM
Nowadays, only the free/opensource games have their own downloadable servers, everything else either requires login to a hosted authentication server (Minecraft) or makes you run everything from the server (almost every other FPS nowadays).
On the bright side, it does then to cut the number of cheaters down, on the bad side, a good game could just disappear whenever the game servers are removed, or worse, the authentication servers - here's looking at Sony
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @02:15AM
Yes, it's all about the monthly fees. I run an OpenArena server on Amazon EC2. Amazon gets my monthly fees, and the OpenArena team gets nothing.
(Score: 1) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:18AM
Quoted from GP:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:21AM
Incorrect: The OpenArena team get another server for people to play the game on, and an expanded community of players, at no incremental cost to themselves.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedBear on Tuesday March 11 2014, @04:46AM
Whatever happened to privately operated dedicated servers? Don't big corporate gaming corporations allow players to run their own servers anymore? Why do corporations hate freedom?
Rental. Income.
Your "freedom" does nothing to line my pockets with a continuous influx of money.
Playing Devil's Advocate: Pretty sure you still have the freedom to jump on Kickstarter and ask for millions of dollars to create your own blockbuster game that will run on private servers.
Not sure why the word "freedom" even comes up in these contexts. Is someone forcing you to buy this commercial product? Is one of your natural or Constitutionally protected rights being violated by the way this commercial product operates? If you don't agree with the way the product functions, uh, maybe... don't buy it? Maybe go play one of those other games that still runs on private servers? Hmm?
[Why do I suddenly feel as if my weirdly football-shaped head is slowly turning sideways as my voice slowly increases in pitch?]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by geb on Tuesday March 11 2014, @06:16AM
Freedom is not just about having a complete set of rights, whether "complete" is defined constitutionally, naturally, or whatever.
Freedom is a measure of how many options are available to you.
Freedom can therefore be increased by technology, which opens up more options, and it can be denied to you by crippled technology, which limits how you use it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by dilbert on Tuesday March 11 2014, @09:48AM
Users who complain about a lack of freedom while still purchasing subscription or DRM'd games makes as much sense as someone complaining that GM makes crappy cars as they drive a brand new GM off the lot.
I'm not saying you need to be the next RMS, but if you're actively paying someone each month for a captive user experience, what exactly is their motivation to change?
Vote with your actions/money/feet!
(Score: 1) by basecase on Wednesday March 12 2014, @04:15PM
Did you ever play AlterIW. It was a real nice server emulator framework for MW2, BO but it got the old shutdown. Was quite nice though. Could run your own server with your own rules, mods, all that good stuff.