Mainframe Raises Another $22 Million for Development of Its Cloud-Native MMORPG | MMORPG.com
Mainframe Industries, which is developing a cloud-native MMORPG rumored to be published by Microsoft, has raised another $22 million in investment funding.
"Are you ready for a completely cloud-native MMORPG?" - Yup
Is any MMO gamer dream to play a MMORPG with little to no lag, while playing solo or with hundreds of other players in the same zone.
I mean..at least this is what I understand from "cloud-native-mmorpg"., right?
Anyway, cloud gaming is the future, at least in terms of MASSIVE games.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy? Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
Just a point. The title says "Mainframe Raises Another $22 Million" but the article says this is the TOTAL amount raised with around $8.3M being previous.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
The difference between this and other MMORPGs is apparently that they've found a much less efficient way to handle rendering the game. And that's supposed to be a good thing, because some corporate suits who have never played a more demanding game than Solitaire think the cloud the solution to everything.
The screenshots look like a blurred conan exiles. And for being a cloud based game, they need to work on the artwork of the clouds in the pics too. I mean, I hope for good things, but I haven't been impressed in over 15 years.
The cloud is just someone else's computer. Once you realize that, it's a lot less impressive. There are totally legitimate reasons to run your code on someone else's computer. Real-time game rendering just isn't a very good use of it.
So the article calls it a "cloud native MMO" (with quotes). So what does that actually mean and why does it matter to me? Are they saying it will be a completely SaaS/PaaS/[other-aaS]-based solution or does the term cloud-native mean something else? Right now, unless I just completely overlooked it (apologies if so), this just sounds like a marketing term. All they need to do now is say it'll have NFTs and my bingo card will be complete!
You would have thought Amazon would have been all in on "cloud native" with AWS. But I guess MS was the next most likely...
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers. Do something wrong, no one forgets" -from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
Question: Would this help cut down on the rampant hacking/cheating that we see in many of today's MMOs?
It depends on the nature of the cheat. Many cheats the result of the server trusting the client rather than verifying that what the client claims happened is possible. That's a problem of developers being idiots. "Cloud-native" isn't a fix for stupidity, and a sufficiently gullible server can easily be plagued by such cheats even if a game is only playable by streaming. (I'm not claiming that all MMO developers are stupid. Plenty of MMOs aren't plagued by this class of cheating because competent developers made it categorically impossible.) This tends to be the most severe and game-breaking class of cheats, as it can include things like warping around, invincibility, or super fast skill spam.
It's also possible to have cheats that are a result of third party tools reading things from system memory but not altering them. Aimbots and some other types of bots are perhaps the most common example of this class of cheating. Being able to see things that you shouldn't by removing line of sight restrictions is another type of cheat in this class. Purely streamed games make these types of cheats massively harder to pull off. To be clear, some but not all bot programs belong in this class of cheats, as it depends on how the bot is created.
Question: Would this help cut down on the rampant hacking/cheating that we see in many of today's MMOs?
It depends on the nature of the cheat. Many cheats the result of the server trusting the client rather than verifying that what the client claims happened is possible. That's a problem of developers being idiots. "Cloud-native" isn't a fix for stupidity, and a sufficiently gullible server can easily be plagued by such cheats even if a game is only playable by streaming. (I'm not claiming that all MMO developers are stupid. Plenty of MMOs aren't plagued by this class of cheating because competent developers made it categorically impossible.) This tends to be the most severe and game-breaking class of cheats, as it can include things like warping around, invincibility, or super fast skill spam.
It's also possible to have cheats that are a result of third party tools reading things from system memory but not altering them. Aimbots and some other types of bots are perhaps the most common example of this class of cheating. Being able to see things that you shouldn't by removing line of sight restrictions is another type of cheat in this class. Purely streamed games make these types of cheats massively harder to pull off. To be clear, some but not all bot programs belong in this class of cheats, as it depends on how the bot is created.
A cheat bot *can* be defeated. It requires the client to display a 'false location', with only the actual location being on the server. How many people would actually accept that as a solution, I don't know.
Or you can simply get rid of action-based aiming all together.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Question: Would this help cut down on the rampant hacking/cheating that we see in many of today's MMOs?
It depends on the nature of the cheat. Many cheats the result of the server trusting the client rather than verifying that what the client claims happened is possible. That's a problem of developers being idiots. "Cloud-native" isn't a fix for stupidity, and a sufficiently gullible server can easily be plagued by such cheats even if a game is only playable by streaming. (I'm not claiming that all MMO developers are stupid. Plenty of MMOs aren't plagued by this class of cheating because competent developers made it categorically impossible.) This tends to be the most severe and game-breaking class of cheats, as it can include things like warping around, invincibility, or super fast skill spam.
It's also possible to have cheats that are a result of third party tools reading things from system memory but not altering them. Aimbots and some other types of bots are perhaps the most common example of this class of cheating. Being able to see things that you shouldn't by removing line of sight restrictions is another type of cheat in this class. Purely streamed games make these types of cheats massively harder to pull off. To be clear, some but not all bot programs belong in this class of cheats, as it depends on how the bot is created.
A cheat bot *can* be defeated. It requires the client to display a 'false location', with only the actual location being on the server. How many people would actually accept that as a solution, I don't know.
Or you can simply get rid of action-based aiming all together.
Any particular cheat can be stopped. Some are just a lot harder to stop than others. For example, line of sight cheats are typically possible because the server tells the client where everything is, and the client only selectively draws the things that you can actually see. The problem is that determining what you can see is often very hard for the server to do.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
The main reason for game developers to be interested in running a game exclusively this way is that it's the perfect form of DRM. Players can't get the game executable, can't get art assets, can't get anything. Good luck trying to pirate that.
Of course, it's also likely to prevent piracy in another way. Most people don't try to pirate awful games that they aren't interested in playing.
Will it be like playing a streamed game? If so data caps will be a problem. This will limit who can really play. Having things local really helps with data caps.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
The problem is that streaming is the expensive way to do things. The underlying reality is that computations are cheap and bandwidth is expensive. Rendering locally is heavy on computations and light on bandwidth. Streaming is light on computations and heavy on bandwidth. Unless streaming is used selectively and infrequently, it's inevitably going to be a lot more expensive than just rendering the game locally.
Paying for the bandwidth that it takes to do streaming right and allow you to stream games well for a few hours per day is always going to be a lot more expensive than buying the hardware to render the game well locally, even if you have to completely replace all of your hardware every few years. And buying the hardware to render the game locally will give you a better gaming experience, too, in addition to being cheaper.
Streaming only becomes the cheaper option when you're looking at people who play very demanding games (so that the cheap hardware that you'd still need to stream a game can't just render it locally), but play them very little (so that the cumulative bandwidth requirements will be low). If your idea of gaming is playing AAA games for a few hours per month, then maybe streaming genuinely will be cheaper. But I'm skeptical that that's a large market.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
The problem is that streaming is the expensive way to do things. The underlying reality is that computations are cheap and bandwidth is expensive. Rendering locally is heavy on computations and light on bandwidth. Streaming is light on computations and heavy on bandwidth. Unless streaming is used selectively and infrequently, it's inevitably going to be a lot more expensive than just rendering the game locally.
Paying for the bandwidth that it takes to do streaming right and allow you to stream games well for a few hours per day is always going to be a lot more expensive than buying the hardware to render the game well locally, even if you have to completely replace all of your hardware every few years. And buying the hardware to render the game locally will give you a better gaming experience, too, in addition to being cheaper.
Streaming only becomes the cheaper option when you're looking at people who play very demanding games (so that the cheap hardware that you'd still need to stream a game can't just render it locally), but play them very little (so that the cumulative bandwidth requirements will be low). If your idea of gaming is playing AAA games for a few hours per month, then maybe streaming genuinely will be cheaper. But I'm skeptical that that's a large market.
Depends in how you define "cheaper"
Take geforce now. Streaming consecutively for about 10 hours a day at 1080p and 60fps is about 20 GBs and can be done with even a 15MBPS connection.
For a month that would be about half of the usual data caps that some services put on plans.
If you want to push out costs between buying a pc and streaming. You still would need an internet connection, the only cost would then relate to the game and the service. Geforce now is about 10 per month. A new pc with a 3060 would be somewhere in the 1500 range. So by the time the pcs value came into play the graphics card would be extremely outdated.
Even if you factor in a cheap pc around 700 dollars to run the streaming game, it still would factor out cheaper for the first 4 to 5 years. But cloud games are built to run on virtually anything, so that's being generous.
There are a lot of problems when it comes to cloud based games. Costs are the wrong place to volley your dislike though.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
The problem is that streaming is the expensive way to do things. The underlying reality is that computations are cheap and bandwidth is expensive. Rendering locally is heavy on computations and light on bandwidth. Streaming is light on computations and heavy on bandwidth. Unless streaming is used selectively and infrequently, it's inevitably going to be a lot more expensive than just rendering the game locally.
Paying for the bandwidth that it takes to do streaming right and allow you to stream games well for a few hours per day is always going to be a lot more expensive than buying the hardware to render the game well locally, even if you have to completely replace all of your hardware every few years. And buying the hardware to render the game locally will give you a better gaming experience, too, in addition to being cheaper.
Streaming only becomes the cheaper option when you're looking at people who play very demanding games (so that the cheap hardware that you'd still need to stream a game can't just render it locally), but play them very little (so that the cumulative bandwidth requirements will be low). If your idea of gaming is playing AAA games for a few hours per month, then maybe streaming genuinely will be cheaper. But I'm skeptical that that's a large market.
Depends in how you define "cheaper"
Take geforce now. Streaming consecutively for about 10 hours a day at 1080p and 60fps is about 20 GBs and can be done with even a 15MBPS connection.
For a month that would be about half of the usual data caps that some services put on plans.
If you want to push out costs between buying a pc and streaming. You still would need an internet connection, the only cost would then relate to the game and the service. Geforce now is about 10 per month. A new pc with a 3060 would be somewhere in the 1500 range. So by the time the pcs value came into play the graphics card would be extremely outdated.
Even if you factor in a cheap pc around 700 dollars to run the streaming game, it still would factor out cheaper for the first 4 to 5 years. But cloud games are built to run on virtually anything, so that's being generous.
There are a lot of problems when it comes to cloud based games. Costs are the wrong place to volley your dislike though.
15 Mbps * 10 hours = 540 Gb per day. That's about 2 TB per month, and if everyone tried to use that kind of bandwidth, ISPs would find ways to block it in a hurry. Yes, yes, 10 hours per day is a lot, but you chose that number, not me.
And that's also why I said enough to do it well. Compressing your data by 99.6% is going to be quite a hit to image quality. It might seem fine when not much is changing, but that's going to be awful when the image changes fast, such as if you try to rotate the camera. A cheap computer with an integrated GPU will be able to run most games just fine these days, even if it takes greatly reducing graphical settings. Even at those reduced settings, the reliability of having the game rendered locally will still be a far superior gaming experience to streaming.
Both AMD and Intel offer integrated GPUs rated at around 2 TFLOPS these days, which is more than the GeForce GTX 580 did, and that was the top of the line GPU from a mere ten years ago. Yes, yes, a lot of people have lower end integrated GPUs than that, but don't underestimate what even low end modern hardware can do. And future low end hardware is only going to get better from here. The modern gaming potato can run just about any game at suitably reduced settings, and the only real exceptions are a handful of games made by developers who are flagrantly bad at optimization.
Meh, I distrust that cloud gaming is ever going to be the future. Though admittedly its a unreasonable gut reaction similar to a Luddite's mistrust of steam power and those ding dang horseless carriages.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
The problem is that streaming is the expensive way to do things. The underlying reality is that computations are cheap and bandwidth is expensive. Rendering locally is heavy on computations and light on bandwidth. Streaming is light on computations and heavy on bandwidth. Unless streaming is used selectively and infrequently, it's inevitably going to be a lot more expensive than just rendering the game locally.
Paying for the bandwidth that it takes to do streaming right and allow you to stream games well for a few hours per day is always going to be a lot more expensive than buying the hardware to render the game well locally, even if you have to completely replace all of your hardware every few years. And buying the hardware to render the game locally will give you a better gaming experience, too, in addition to being cheaper.
Streaming only becomes the cheaper option when you're looking at people who play very demanding games (so that the cheap hardware that you'd still need to stream a game can't just render it locally), but play them very little (so that the cumulative bandwidth requirements will be low). If your idea of gaming is playing AAA games for a few hours per month, then maybe streaming genuinely will be cheaper. But I'm skeptical that that's a large market.
Depends in how you define "cheaper"
Take geforce now. Streaming consecutively for about 10 hours a day at 1080p and 60fps is about 20 GBs and can be done with even a 15MBPS connection.
For a month that would be about half of the usual data caps that some services put on plans.
If you want to push out costs between buying a pc and streaming. You still would need an internet connection, the only cost would then relate to the game and the service. Geforce now is about 10 per month. A new pc with a 3060 would be somewhere in the 1500 range. So by the time the pcs value came into play the graphics card would be extremely outdated.
Even if you factor in a cheap pc around 700 dollars to run the streaming game, it still would factor out cheaper for the first 4 to 5 years. But cloud games are built to run on virtually anything, so that's being generous.
There are a lot of problems when it comes to cloud based games. Costs are the wrong place to volley your dislike though.
15 Mbps * 10 hours = 540 Gb per day. That's about 2 TB per month, and if everyone tried to use that kind of bandwidth, ISPs would find ways to block it in a hurry. Yes, yes, 10 hours per day is a lot, but you chose that number, not me.
And that's also why I said enough to do it well. Compressing your data by 99.6% is going to be quite a hit to image quality. It might seem fine when not much is changing, but that's going to be awful when the image changes fast, such as if you try to rotate the camera. A cheap computer with an integrated GPU will be able to run most games just fine these days, even if it takes greatly reducing graphical settings. Even at those reduced settings, the reliability of having the game rendered locally will still be a far superior gaming experience to streaming.
Both AMD and Intel offer integrated GPUs rated at around 2 TFLOPS these days, which is more than the GeForce GTX 580 did, and that was the top of the line GPU from a mere ten years ago. Yes, yes, a lot of people have lower end integrated GPUs than that, but don't underestimate what even low end modern hardware can do. And future low end hardware is only going to get better from here. The modern gaming potato can run just about any game at suitably reduced settings, and the only real exceptions are a handful of games made by developers who are flagrantly bad at optimization.
Here's your mistake, 15mbps is the speed of your connection not the entire usage to stream. That doesn't even consider streaming quality for 720p at 60fps or higher. 1080p at 60fps requires less than 5mbps based on geforce now's estimates equating to about 2GB per hour or 20GB per day for 10 hours.
I use GFN all the time, and I have a 3080 desktop. Compression quality really only becomes an issue hen the connection is poor.
You may see increased ping cause some lag, or some degradation if you have a bad connection.. But let's be honest, even if you don't see the disconnection or degradation when rendering locally it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It's really not that big of a deal when playing online games because the situations are similar.
There's a case to be made for both sides. I don't feel like costs are one of them. Performance on one end, scalability and convenience on the other. I guess we will see what shakes out, but I fear you'll be surprised.
In almost every case I can think of gamers have chosen convenience over quality.
Would be great if mmorpg rethink what item material and spell effects are. like having mage applying water spell on to armor when fight fire dragon. The game Deep Down from Capcom was very close to what i like to see.
Comments
Is any MMO gamer dream to play a MMORPG with little to no lag, while playing solo or with hundreds of other players in the same zone.
I mean..at least this is what I understand from "cloud-native-mmorpg"., right?
Anyway, cloud gaming is the future, at least in terms of MASSIVE games.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
You would have thought Amazon would have been all in on "cloud native" with AWS. But I guess MS was the next most likely...
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
It's also possible to have cheats that are a result of third party tools reading things from system memory but not altering them. Aimbots and some other types of bots are perhaps the most common example of this class of cheating. Being able to see things that you shouldn't by removing line of sight restrictions is another type of cheat in this class. Purely streamed games make these types of cheats massively harder to pull off. To be clear, some but not all bot programs belong in this class of cheats, as it depends on how the bot is created.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Of course, it's also likely to prevent piracy in another way. Most people don't try to pirate awful games that they aren't interested in playing.
Ofc it will be, We all want to do more with less, so if you can stream a game to a tv so that the customer has 1000,- more to spent on silly cosmetics instead of a gaming pc.
The less it takes for a user to use someting, the more likely they are to use it.
Paying for the bandwidth that it takes to do streaming right and allow you to stream games well for a few hours per day is always going to be a lot more expensive than buying the hardware to render the game well locally, even if you have to completely replace all of your hardware every few years. And buying the hardware to render the game locally will give you a better gaming experience, too, in addition to being cheaper.
Streaming only becomes the cheaper option when you're looking at people who play very demanding games (so that the cheap hardware that you'd still need to stream a game can't just render it locally), but play them very little (so that the cumulative bandwidth requirements will be low). If your idea of gaming is playing AAA games for a few hours per month, then maybe streaming genuinely will be cheaper. But I'm skeptical that that's a large market.
Take geforce now. Streaming consecutively for about 10 hours a day at 1080p and 60fps is about 20 GBs and can be done with even a 15MBPS connection.
For a month that would be about half of the usual data caps that some services put on plans.
If you want to push out costs between buying a pc and streaming. You still would need an internet connection, the only cost would then relate to the game and the service. Geforce now is about 10 per month. A new pc with a 3060 would be somewhere in the 1500 range. So by the time the pcs value came into play the graphics card would be extremely outdated.
Even if you factor in a cheap pc around 700 dollars to run the streaming game, it still would factor out cheaper for the first 4 to 5 years. But cloud games are built to run on virtually anything, so that's being generous.
There are a lot of problems when it comes to cloud based games. Costs are the wrong place to volley your dislike though.
And that's also why I said enough to do it well. Compressing your data by 99.6% is going to be quite a hit to image quality. It might seem fine when not much is changing, but that's going to be awful when the image changes fast, such as if you try to rotate the camera. A cheap computer with an integrated GPU will be able to run most games just fine these days, even if it takes greatly reducing graphical settings. Even at those reduced settings, the reliability of having the game rendered locally will still be a far superior gaming experience to streaming.
Both AMD and Intel offer integrated GPUs rated at around 2 TFLOPS these days, which is more than the GeForce GTX 580 did, and that was the top of the line GPU from a mere ten years ago. Yes, yes, a lot of people have lower end integrated GPUs than that, but don't underestimate what even low end modern hardware can do. And future low end hardware is only going to get better from here. The modern gaming potato can run just about any game at suitably reduced settings, and the only real exceptions are a handful of games made by developers who are flagrantly bad at optimization.
I use GFN all the time, and I have a 3080 desktop. Compression quality really only becomes an issue hen the connection is poor.
You may see increased ping cause some lag, or some degradation if you have a bad connection..
But let's be honest, even if you don't see the disconnection or degradation when rendering locally it doesn't mean that it's not happening. It's really not that big of a deal when playing online games because the situations are similar.
There's a case to be made for both sides. I don't feel like costs are one of them. Performance on one end, scalability and convenience on the other. I guess we will see what shakes out, but I fear you'll be surprised.
In almost every case I can think of gamers have chosen convenience over quality.