As a fun note, Pokemon Go (from a company spun off from Google) was one of the first major games to use Kubernetes, and the infamous scaling issues during its launch in 2016 helped resolve many bugs: <a href="https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/bringing-Pokemon-GO-to-life-on-Google-Cloud.html" rel="nofollow">https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/bringing-Pokemo...</a><p>Although Pokemon Go has fewer latency concerns than a FPS/MMO, which Ubisoft (Rainbow 6 Siege, The Division) excels at.
I feel like it's fairly novel (not to say unpredecented?) that one of the top game publishers (Ubisoft) is collaborating with Google on this open-source product.<p>Most game publishers have specialized divisions - Demonware for Activision, EA no doubt has one too - that build closely guarded proprietary multiplayer networking toolkits, as it becomes part of their competitive advantage..<p>Excited to see how this pans out..<p>edit: I hadn't heard of AWS GameLift before..
I'm working on a massive-scale game server deployment engine that utilizes docker for a new startup, and the fact that this is open source is tremendously beneficial to the scalable gameserver community. Currently we're deeply integrated in the Google cloud platform and are currently expecting a release within the next few weeks or so, which is one of the reasons this post came as such a surprise to me! We're planning on releasing most of our codebase under the Apache and MIT licenses, but doing so has been complex and slow. Hats off to them!
I’d love to understand how this relates to the work that Improbable are doing in supporting massive scale online game environments.<p>Is this an open source competitor? How do they compare?
I was working for a Japanese mobile game company back in 2016 and proposed using Kubernetes for my project. They really warmed up once they understood Pokemon Go was doing exactly this (I had no idea beforehand, but was happy to see it support my decision). Sadly the company folded long before my project made it to release.<p>Really cool to see this go open source. I really miss working on stuff like that. Sigh.
is this a way for google to get a lot of data? for example, more info about players, their preferences, etc.<p>Also, maybe they can get a large training set of how human players act/spend/etc in complex games, which could be a very useful training data set for their own reinforcement learning/AI efforts?