A Microsoft job advert appears to hint that the company is working both on the successor to the Xbox 360 and a massively multi-player online game (MMO) that’s capable of hosting 300,000 players all at once.
The advert read: “Microsoft Games Studios is looking for experienced game developers to work on next generation Xbox platform titles and Windows games.” Specifically, Microsoft Game Studios is looking for: “an experienced server developer to help develop our server architecture. We are building an extremely high performance system to extend console games to the server in new ways; creating a completely new set of web services to support dynamic programming information of games and scheduling data.” And that’s not all, Microsoft is currently “building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time with real money on the line (anti-cheating, etc).”
Most MMO games use multiple servers to each host a small fraction of the overall players in the game. EVE Online is the only single-server MMO, according to Develop. And while that does have around 300,000 players, only a peak of 50,000 of them have ever been online at once.
While Microsoft’s Xbox 360 motion-sensing peripheral, widely expected to be unveiled at E3 next week, indicates the company is taking the mainstream casual gamer market seriously, this also looks like it’s taking the hardcore of online players seriously too. That said, the company still has to roll out any serious MMO for its current generation Xbox 360.
MMOs or sensor bars or both? What direction will the next generation of consoles go in?
It’s Starwars Old Republic related, Bioware and Simutronics (engine) said they currently can support precisely 300.000 users in one shard. Coincidence? Nah!
Good spot, Gypsy!