Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

Chapter 205 - 205: 203 Server Dilemma

“Mr. Frank, how about catering to the largest group of heterosexual players?” — In the player community, the majority is probably heterosexuals, right?

Lincoln hesitated for a moment, mainly considering female players who would call the paper characters their “wives,” as well as male players who would likewise call them their “husbands.’

He shook his head, dismissing the absurd thought. This was not some gay friend-making platform named with the letter B!

Upon hearing Lincoln, Frank hastily shook his head.

“No! No! No! I was reminded by you, boss! I didn’t think this was possible!”

Frank was also greatly shocked, even having a sudden realization, feeling as if the clouds were parting to reveal a clear sky: “Male strippers, novel! Rare!

Topical! And perfectly avoiding the risk of censorship! What a brilliant idea!”

Frank then sincerely began to flatter Lincoln: “Boss is always the boss! You truly are a genius producer blessed by the heavens! Let’s do it!”

As he said this, he turned around and ran off, eager to get to work and make the idea into reality!

NO!

Lincoln reached out tentatively from behind, no, don’t!

I don’t want to be praised for something like this!!!

Unfortunately, it was too late. Frank had already run far away.

To add insult to injury, a “snicker” came from Princess behind him, probably because she couldn’t hold it in anymore.

Lincoln turned around to see this cocky intern not caring about appearing respectful in front of her boss, she was bent over laughing.

“What, do you also like male strippers? You’re this thrilled?”

Princess, who was laughing so hard that she couldn’t close her mouth, looked up at Lincoln in surprise and laughingly swatted him: ‘What on earth are you talking about!”

“You don’t like them? Then Frank is probably going to be heartbroken.”

Camille Victoria did not know how to respond, she could only look at him speechlessly.

Not far away, Randall, after watching these two “fooling around,” sighed about how wonderful it was to be young, then stepped forward to hand over the specific plan of the “Freedom Day” to Lincoln.

He also expressed a concern: server capacity issues.

The Virtual reality technology is impressive, but it’s not possible to build over 10 million virtual cities for players to enjoy.

Especially when these virtual cities look very real and rich in content, neither the player’s Mirage console nor Cloud Dream’s pitiful servers can handle it, even advanced distributed computing is not feasible.

Something that players might not realize: in reality, the range that each player can simultaneously observe is limited, the servers only construct the city within one kilometer around the player, the precision greatly decreases at the 2 to 3 kilometers range, and beyond 3 kilometers, it’s simply a map texture.

This is why in “Assassins’ Alliance,” the sniper rifle with the longest range has only a distance of 800 meters, even if all possible modifications are installed, it won’t exceed 1 kilometer.

— Because any further, it wouldn’t support the high-precision display of the map and NPCs.

Of course, if it is a spacious environment, this range will expand, but being spacious means having fewer content elements, and thus consuming fewer computational resources, expanding the range will not cause additional pressure.

In all honesty, this range is already very outrageous in terms of technology.

Especially in urban environments, under normal circumstances, it is enough for players to cause trouble and have fun.

Based on this situation, Randall expressed some worry: “If too many players fight on the same map at the same time, there’s a high probability that the server will crash. But if the mirrored servers are distributed too much and only a hundred or so players are allocated on each map, then there would have to be tens of thousands of mirrored servers, and the server could still crash!”

After all, competitions are not the same as players just playing for fun, with the former, the majority of data is local, and the server only collects key data.

But to gather countless players together, the server’s responsibility significantly increases, and the pressure would be immense.

Many players who don’t understand the situation in depth might think, why don’t certain large-scale online games, with millions of players online simultaneously, have any problems?

Actually, these are two different things, the premise of having millions of players online is that many servers are divided to carry the load.

Not only servers are divided, but even the same map would need to create mirror servers to divide the load, limiting the quantity of players on the same map at the same time.

Exactly how many players can be online simultaneously depends on how strong the servers are and how cutting-edge the technology is.

Even if both the server and technology are strong and cutting-edge enough, you still can’t cram 1000 people onto one map.

So all those advertisements saying things like “thousands of people on one map competition,” “massive battles with tens of thousands of people,” are all lies, it’s simply impossible.

The hardware simply can’t do it.

Unless you’re a pixel or text-based game.

Randall was in a quandary, as the company had just launched a game which is selling great, but can it really afford top-end supercomputing servers?

— He still didn’t know that Cloud Dream is in a tax-exempt status right now, realistically just the profit from the game should be just about enough.

Of course, that’s only taking into account the cost of top-of-the-line supercomputing hardware, and not factoring in server room location, electricity, cooling, maintenance, etc.

Once you factor all that in, it wouldn’t be enough again.

So, after a lengthy discussion with his employees, the solution he came up with is — to try our best to buy better servers, and at the same time extend the event schedule to allow players to participate in batches and at different times.

As long as the initial preliminary selection phase eliminates the majority of the players, the subsequent pressure will decrease, until eventually only a handful of players remain and the servers can completely manage.

This is a mature and steady solution, it’s relatively safe, has a very high feasibility, and also saves a lot of money.

However, Lincoln shook his head and directly declined, “No, 500 people on one map is just too few, not exciting enough, there should be at least 3,000 people together, right?”

“And if the event is stretched out too long, it won’t be called ‘Freedom Day’ anymore, might as well call it ‘Freedom Month’

“You guys don’t have to worry about the server issue, I’ll take care of it.”

Just relying on the money made from the game, covering the cost of supercomputing would be a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty of money earned from the consoles!

Didn’t Lincoln hold back the console’s production capacity this week, isn’t the leftover money just enough?

Besides, allowing thousands of people to hang out in the same map, in the same virtual world at the same time, this issue will need to be solved sooner or later.

They can’t have countless virtual worlds in the future, but each world only has 100 DeoDle in it, right?

That wouldn’t even count as a second world, would it?!

So in one word, buy everything!

As for the specific price, Lincoln had some knowledge.

The top-of-the-range supercomputer “Dongting Sixth Generation” currently sold in Daxia, the price for the computing hardware alone is around 6.3 billion, the performance is extremely powerful.

To support the grand virtual world that Lincoln envisioned, it’s still a bit off.

But with Cloud Dream’s targeted adjustments and optimizations, combined with advanced virtual world construction technology, maybe they could squeeze up to ten thousand players into the Metropolis at once! That should be enough for the players to mess around at will!

— At least for now it is.

As for issues such as the server room, electricity, cooling, and such, they sound very troublesome, so Lincoln decided

To call LuDoraemon•Wei.

When you have both money and connections, things often tend to go very smoothly.

The only issue he was worried about was: whether there is enough time..