
Simplified global game management: Introducing Game Servers - mxschmitt
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gaming/introducing-google-cloud-game-servers
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vvanders
It's been a while since I spun up a dedicated server but how is this anything
special compared to just spinning up normal server instances?

I see a lot of buzzwords but nothing that stands out technically. Throw some
cpu+memory, open a udp socket, register with the matchmaker coordinator and
away you go.

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manigandham
It's a managed version of Agones:
[https://agones.dev/site/docs/overview/](https://agones.dev/site/docs/overview/)

That overview describes it well. You can already run a game server as a
standard Kubernetes service but this wraps it with some more primitives around
gaming features like matchmaking, session maintenance, fleets, allocation of
warm servers, etc.

~~~
vvanders
Thanks, that's what I thought and was trying to figure out if I missed any
reason this was staying on the front page given it's just a re-branding of an
existing open source solution.

~~~
markmandel
Hi there! I'm the founder of Agones, so wanted to give some additional
perspective.

GCGS provides a lot of functionality over the top of Agones. The big win here
is that while Agones works great within a single Kubernetes cluster, it
requires a lot of manual work to orchestrate across multiple clusters.

This is what Google Cloud Game Servers brings to the table - flexible ways to
orchestrate and manage multiple Agones clusters around the world, and the
Fleets of warm Game Servers on them.

We also work really hard so that is it's easy to move from open source Agones
-> GCGS, but also move back out of you no longer want our management layer.

There's more stuff on top of that, but I hope that helps clear things up

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vvanders
Oh yeah, I didn't mean it to be a knock against Agones, more that there seemed
to be a fair amount of marketing speak in the google copy("supercharged",
"Companies like Activision Blizzard are benefiting from our ... artificial
intelligence (AI) capabilities") and it wasn't clear what the value was.

Honestly, your comment is much clearer than most of the linked article.

~~~
markmandel
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

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tmpz22
Cool, Google created a cloud-native solution for people who want to create
games for Google Stadia. You can buy into the ecosystem, built on top of
Kubernetes - the system recommended for large scale projects and teams with
hundreds of servers (but not more then ~5,000). An ecosystem most
knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless you are able to do
a relatively large amount of due diligence and have dedicated staff who are
domain experts for kubernetes. For Google Stadia. Which is pivoting into
really pushing for exclusive titles, and was the driving force for some
studios removing their games from Geforce Now, because unlike Google Stadia
Geforce Now allows you to bring your own games which you already own and avoid
re-buying the same game twice.

Google is trying to get a juicy bite of the games industry by building a
walled garden around exclusive titles and proprietary cloud setups. Microsoft
and Sony have used the same tactics (particularly exclusive titles). The chief
argument is access, the idea that more people can now game who previously
couldn't, but I don't buy it.

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outworlder
> An ecosystem most knowledgeable SREs will recommend your team not use unless
> you are able to do a relatively large amount of due diligence and have
> dedicated staff who are domain experts for kubernetes

Who are those 'knowledgeable SREs' and what are they recommending instead?
Docker Swarm? VMs?

There is a place for those approaches, but people often underestimate the
amount of work that is involved to bring large services into production, work
that has been packaged and commoditized by K8s, by domain experts.

Moreover, it allows people to speak the same language and easily share their
solutions.

Actual domain experts are required (today) if you want to bring databases and
other stateful workloads to Kubernetes. But stateless? I'll run MicroK8s in a
Raspberry Pi if I need to run containers. There is so much stuff that's taken
care of by K8s that I can't'see why one wouldn't use it, unless they need to
just run a single container somewhere.

> and proprietary cloud setups.

Proprietary?
[https://github.com/googleforgames/agones](https://github.com/googleforgames/agones)

You don't have to run it on GKE, you know. You can manage it yourself. Which
I'm not sure why you would do, since you are complaining about the lack of
domain expertise.

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na85
What happens when I launch my game on this platform and Google kills it next
fall with no warning?

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iwalton3
The underlying software is open source, so you could just host it somewhere
else. [https://agones.dev/site/](https://agones.dev/site/)

