The ScooterBlog

Maybe we can get Greggy (now that he’s with IGN!) to ask this question to the guys at EA. Instead of blowing away servers for games that aren’t even a year and a half old (and that at the time, didn’t have a newer version in existance, like NBA Street V3, why not virtualize the machines to condense, say, five servers into one?

I’m becoming more and more apparent of the gains that are to be had with virtualization every day. I use it on my Windows Vista machine to have full compatiblity with applications that only like Windows XP. I use it at work so that I can quickly set up environments for testing, and for supporting multiple actions at once that one machine cannot do (multiple Outlook sessions for example).

Our company is beginning to leverage this technology in what has become a very popular method for this … server compression. Instead of having ten servers that aren’t using all of their power, combining them into more efficient blade servers (or even using older servers that are decently powerful) can turn these 10 physical boxes into ten “virtual” servers that only use a single box.

I get EA’s stance from a business sense. If the game’s following is dwindling, and you have put together a dedicated server (or two, or three) to handle the online play for the game, it doesn’t become efficient from a power or resource sense to maintain them. But, you do still have many gamers who want to play these older games, and losing the online component can alienate those players. Not to mention (note the bias here), EA tends to be more about the money, not the gamer.

Not knowing what platform that EA programs their server content with, but assuming it is on x86 servers, virtualization could easily take bunches of these old servers onto one physical box. Mony saved, resources saved, gamers left happy.

Now, we are ignoring a likely component behind some of these games on this list … EA doesn’t want you to play NCAA Football 2005 when they have 06 and 07 out there … a simple money grab. But aside from open sourcing these servers (not realistic, private intellectual property), why not virtualize?