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June 9, 2004 Link to this post
What Consoles Lack - Massive Multiplayer
There's an editorial over at Gamespot that faults consoles for supporting only 16 players per game, max - it argues that PC games are going past this by an order of magnitude, and the reason is dedicated servers. There are some decent counter-arguments in the forum thread started by 3Suns that brought this to our attention... but the red flags for me went up when I read this line:
The reason PC games can handle so many simultaneous players is because publishers release dedicated server software.
Actually, the reason some PC games can handle so many simultaneous players is because they keep track of fewer variables than Halo does, and therefore require less bandwidth per player. (Compare bandwidth requirements for Battlefield 1942 and the PC version of Halo - which HAS dedicated servers - for a clear example of this.) Right or wrong, though, the article gives folks something to discuss - and that's never a bad thing. (Louis Wu 09:35:41 UTC)
