Cloud computing to support the evolution of massive multiplayer online games

In these recent years, with the gain in popularity of online games, we are witnessing a progressive increment in the number of massive multiplayer online games available over the Internet. Given the scalability requirements imposed by a huge population of users over an extended length of time, game providers face the major challenge of long-term IT infrastructures dimensioning. In particular, the risks are over-allocation (wasting resource and money) or non-timely upgrades (loosing subscribers and revenues.) In this paper we advocate Cloud Computing as a viable solution to dynamically allocate resource for a massive game service infrastructure in order to satisfy users’ needs while minimizing maintenance costs. To this extent we envision a mid-term future where game provisioning will be performed by means of a three-tier architecture: the users, the game provider, and the cloud provider. We believe that many medium/small game providers may benefit from the on-demand resources allocation infrastructure offered by the cloud, due to shorter deployment time and reduced total cost of ownership.