Scalability and availability for massively multiplayer online games

International audienceMMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are getting ever more popular, but current game server architectures do not scale with the number of players. Instead of addressing the issue, the most common workaround in the industry is to use multiple distinct and non communicating game servers. After a brief overview of existing game server architectures and methods to distribute server load, this position paper outlines another kind of architecture that should scale and discusses the difficulty of evaluating game platforms on a large scale