Cloud Data Management for Online Games: Potentials and Open Issues

Abstract

The number of players, for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), typically reaches millions of people, geographically distributed throughout the world. Worldwide revenues for these games increase by billions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, their complex architecture makes them hard to maintain, resulting in considerable costs and development risks. For normal operation, MMORPGs have to access huge amounts of diverse data. With increasing numbers of players, managing growing volumes of data in a relational database becomes a big challenge, which cannot be overcome by simply adding new servers. Cloud storage systems are emerging solutions focusing on providing scalability and high performance for Cloud applications, social media, etc. However, Cloud storage systems are in general not designed for processing transactions or providing high levels of consistency. In this paper, we present our current work-in-progress by analyzing the existing architecture of MMORPGs and classifying relevant data. Based on this, we highlight the design requirements, identify the major research challenges, and propose a Cloud-based model for MMORPGs that we currently implement as a testbed for further evaluation.