At the Game Developers Conference Online in Austin during the second week in October, a dozen hopeful young entrepreneurs approached our booth selling versions of the same ambitious vision. “We’re building a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s going to be the next World of Warcraft, the next Call of Duty. It’s gonna be huge,” they said. These hopeful game mavens were seeking insight on exactly how you build an MMO infrastructure. Not surprisingly, many of them were woefully unprepared. They didn’t know what a load balancer was. They had no idea about data transport costs between data centers. They hadn’t really thought about the impact of hardware at cloud providers on the user experience of their game customers (hint: old servers usually mean unhappy or lost customers).

A few years ago we would have shaken our heads, wished them good luck, and figured we would probably never see that game released. Today there is a far greater chance that these folks can bring the next MMO to market. What’s changed? The arrival of specialized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. In a nutshell, a PaaS allows an entrepreneur to focus on building their cloud application, avoiding upfront capital expenses through outsourced management of their IT infrastructure to a third party.

This is a level up from the cloud itself, which provides outsourced compute power in a more raw fashion. PaaS providers offer database as a service (MongoLab, MongoHQ) or runtime environment as a service (Heroku, Nodejitsu, AppFog), for example. A PaaS can also deliver even more advanced capabilities. StackMob, for example, puts in place a suite of PaaS offerings that radically streamline mobile application development, launch and hosting by providing in one integrated package an environment to code up, host, and run in the cloud mobile applications.

What’s more, a PaaS can even be taken to the point where it eliminates almost all technology skill requirements. GameSalad allows designers to quickly design and publish game applications that even include animation purely using visual design tools. Eliminating technological complexity serves to eliminate a critical barrier to innovation and new company foundation. We’ve all met someone who felt they had a great idea for a new application of some sort. “And I’m looking for a developer or a CTO,” is inevitably the next thing out of their mouth after they pitch the idea.

If that same great idea could be built far more easily and quickly with a far smaller tech team and nominal capital expenses, then, logically the cost of bringing that idea to market drops considerably. This is the value of the PaaS. And its not just a value to guys with no tech chops. Someone that is a very solid designer and front-end coder may be highly technical but may not be comfortable at all with designing and managing a NoSQL database.

Even highly skilled developers with both front-end and server-side chops usually turn to network engineers for help with load balancing, DNS and other infrastructure aspects that are critical to ensuring a cloud-based application runs fast and clean on any device anywhere in the world. Dennis TK, founder of Foursquare, is fond of explaining that as soon as he got funded, he hired an ex-Googler to completely recode his app to keep it from breaking. If Dennis had been building Foursquare in the present, he could have probably built a more reliable, faster app by leveraging a far more robust PaaS ecosystem to remove many of the software development and infrastructure management requirements that probably caused Foursquare to be so buggy and break all the time in its initial inception.

How many more kids like Dennis are out there with whizbang innovations that could be the next WoW, the next great service for medical records delivery, or the next amazing tool for crowdsourced scientific problem solving? We don’t know but we are a lot more likely to find out in a new era of PaaS-fueled cloud innovation.

Lisa Petrucci is the VP of Global Marketing at Joyent. She started out as a network engineer for Lotus and has held senior sales, marketing and business development roles in enterprise computing companies for the past two decades at companies including IBM and SixApart. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user ansik.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlight
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

A photo sent by an anonymous source reveals extras included in the latest Call of Duty game’s deluxe edition.

Wired Top Stories

The exposure of video games has changed hugely in the last 35 years, and one perfect example is the anticipation for the upcoming game Modern Warfare 3. From simple beginnings in the early 1980′s with the release of the Atari system, to the rise of Nintendo consoles, and to the newer day stars like Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox, gamers have slowly taken over our culture. The video game market is a multibillion dollar money maker for many different developers, and a series of game franchises have been spawned and seen their popularity rise all around the world. Now that we are able to play high quality games on our mobile devices, the market seems aligned to jump off at a rapid pace.

The last 5 years have been especially good for developers. The Call of Duty video game series is a shining example of what can go right when all the proper techniques are employed. There have been 7 different titles delivered from the makers of Call of Duty, and the current title had over $1 billion in sales in the first week alone. This is perfect news for the company, as they are getting ready to release the newest addition to the series, Modern Warfare 3, later this year. It is rumored to be released just before the start of holiday shopping season, and could mean a very profitable sales figure for the company. Now that titans like Playstation and Xbox make it possible to play video games online with gamers around the world in real time, it can be expected that these games will only grow in popularity.

Another critical factor in the growth of the video game industry is the quality of work the studios produce. One look at the previous Call of Duty titles will tell you that Modern Warfare 3 is sure to be one of the most technically amazing games ever produced. The video game marketplace will continue to support this trend as long as the market supports it. Many people are always willing to pay over $60 just to play a game, which is why they can sell so many games in the first week.

As tech advances, we can expect that the industry will continue to be a force in pushing the envelope. It should also be important to watch what happens with the mobile game industry, as that market is massive and still relatively untapped.

The exposure of video games has changed hugely in the last 35 years, and one perfect example is the anticipation for the upcoming game Modern Warfare 3. From simple beginnings in the early 1980′s with the release of the Atari system, to the rise of Nintendo consoles, and to the newer day stars like Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox, gamers have slowly taken over our culture. The video game market is a multibillion dollar money maker for many different developers, and a series of game franchises have been spawned and seen their popularity rise all around the world. Now that we are able to play high quality games on our mobile devices, the market seems aligned to jump off at a rapid pace.

The last 5 years have been especially good for developers. The Call of Duty video game series is a shining example of what can go right when all the proper techniques are employed. There have been 7 different titles delivered from the makers of Call of Duty, and the current title had over $1 billion in sales in the first week alone. This is perfect news for the company, as they are getting ready to release the newest addition to the series, Modern Warfare 3, later this year. It is rumored to be released just before the start of holiday shopping season, and could mean a very profitable sales figure for the company. Now that titans like Playstation and Xbox make it possible to play video games online with gamers around the world in real time, it can be expected that these games will only grow in popularity.

Another critical factor in the growth of the video game industry is the quality of work the studios produce. One look at the previous Call of Duty titles will tell you that Modern Warfare 3 is sure to be one of the most technically amazing games ever produced. The video game marketplace will continue to support this trend as long as the market supports it. Many people are always willing to pay over $60 just to play a game, which is why they can sell so many games in the first week.

As tech advances, we can expect that the industry will continue to be a force in pushing the envelope. It should also be important to watch what happens with the mobile game industry, as that market is massive and still relatively untapped.

Audio battlefield would prepare troops for combat or a typical Slayer concert originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 May 2011 08:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Associated Press  | Email this | Comments
Engadget

This is a montage of the very well known professional PC gamer called Stevy, this is on the game Call Of Duty 4 and all of the footage has been taken from various LAN event footage. The best frags have been taken from footage of two LAN events. The montage can now be played in High Definition. The best quality available, visually crystal clear. Songs Used: Skrein – Reach Remorse Code – Transcend Jochen Miller – India Jochen Miller – Lost Connection Subscribe; to see more videos of a similar nature.

US $21.99 (1 Bid) End Date: Saturday Feb-11-2012 20:29:03 PST Bid now | Add to watch list