A service platform for on-line games

Providing a satisfying experience for players of on-line first-person and multiplayer role-playing games is greatly influenced by the distribution and scalability of the game server infrastructure. Deploying a large, dedicated server infrastructure to support a single game title, however, is an expensive approach that does not make the best use of available resources. In this work-in-progress report, we propose a shared, on-demand service platform for hosting on-line games based on grid technology. A standards-based grid infrastructure provides economies of scale and high availability, necessary prerequisites for a successful on-line gaming service. We give an overview of the service architecture, and a detailed description of a number of middleware services that comprise the game hosting platform. In addition, we describe existing standards in grid technology and show how standard grid toolkit services can be leveraged to realize a gaming grid.