I''ve been playing Shadowbane the last few weeks. I''ve play most of the major MMPORPG''s from general availability to stability. My thoughts are that these games are really small potatos for hardware vendors. An individual vendor might get $1 million a year out of you. So they are unlikely to put more than $100k into sales support. Your vendors would be where you normal gain the insight of your competitors when it comes to hardware configuration. An ethical vendor won''t tell you exactly what they are doing, but they will use the experience they gained there you help you configure your system. Vendors are not the most reliable source. They have a vested interest in your success. So a successful vendor is not going to just sell you a load of crap. They might sell you a half baked idea though. They misunderstand the technical literature they got from R&D and misapply it to your system. The smaller the contract the less likely you are to get the people that really understand it. While game development is small potatos as an industry it has a disproportionate number of extremely talented developers. They may be inexperienced with the technology, but they will learn. So really the best path seems to be sharing information amoung competitors. Certainly you have your trade secret type of information, but the technical information really shouldn''t be. As an example do you need two controllers on two seperate buses in two servers hooked to two DASD boxes or can you eliminate some of that redundancy? I assume most people actually outsource the data center, but when push comes to shove those service level agreements generally don''t provide the guarantees you thought they did. So I''m wondering do they actually share technical information on operating a large online game? Basically have they formed a trade group. Individually none of them have much power, but collectively it is a differant story. Not that you want to bargin collectively, but rather simply that information travels fast. Who is trying what and what kind of results are they getting. Losing an entire market because they don''t provide adequately support that market lights the competitive fire under a vendor. As long as they are still able to sell to the un-enlightened they have little drive for innovation. Admittedly I don''t know a lot about the infrastructure and usage patterns of a large scale online game. It seems though that it is unique. The only thing that seems close is market trading systems. Unlike graphics cards where it is really a seperate, but interdependant market, you don''t have a big enough share of the server, networking and storage market to much influence the direction of their R&D. So the industry itself has to figure out exactly what they need those devices to do to best support them and then it is relatively easy to find a vendor that will build it. To get there you have to have experimentation. I''ll try this while you try that, we''ll compare notes and then we''ll all go with what works best. Moving as an industry is lights the fire under the vendors to be sure what you are trying is represented to the best of it''s capabilities. Individually sure this one game doesn''t make much differance, but this industry has a lot of potential growth and if we get left behind now it is going to cost a fortune to catch up later.

"Small potato[e]s as an industry"? I wouldn''t really say that...

"''Small potato[e]s as an industry''? I wouldn''t really say that..."

Damn, you took the words right out of my mouth. Mostly everone in the industry knows that Video Games are at the forefront of AI and graphics. Direct X was designed specifically for Video Games.

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I am the master of stories.....
If only I could just write them down...