Peer to Peer Massively Multiplayer Game Architecture: An Exploration of Possibilities

by Riley August

Massively multiplayer games are currently a very large segment of the computer game industry. With games such as World of Warcraft having about eight million registered players, and others coming close behind, such games can impact a fairly significant, and vocal, percentage of the global population. The largest problem with massively multiplayer games, however, is the cost associated with operating the large server farms required to house data and run the majority of the game. The general consensus is that clients cannot be depended upon because of cheating, and thin-client designs with massive server farms are the current standard. There is an alternative – a peer to peer architecture, with no large, expensive server farms, could be feasible. An exploration of the idea was conducted, and though no designs or implementations are being proposed, some interesting conjectures result. The use of peer to peer architectures, if explored in more detail, is quite likely to become a significant part of the computer game industry, especially for smaller companies.