The last few years have seen gaming change from its roots. And we’re not talking about improved graphics and deeper stories – we’re talking about the nature of gaming itself. Even casual games like online blackjack have received a new level of interaction a few years ago, with providers like EA Live Casino providing their users with a unique combination of personal interaction and digital gaming. But games have become increasingly social lately, with Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox attracting thousands, often tens of thousands of concurrent players that play together and chat in their virtual worlds.
Gaming is arriving at another crossroads, one that can bring forth another round of major changes: the metaverse(s). Let’s take a look at how gaming may look like inside a virtual universe.
Virtual worlds
One of the biggest events in the digital world was Travis Scott’s “Astronomical”, held inside the shooter Fortnite. Around 12 million (!) Fortnite players have attended the show. Of course, not all of them were connected to the same server at the same time – the show was broadcast to clusters of 50 users at a time, otherwise, Epic’s servers at Amazon would’ve caught fire instantly.
The most concurrent players in a single cluster were 30,000 – this feat was achieved by Dual Universe, a first-person space MMO still under development. But this requires an insane amount of processing power – enough for even Epic’s massive AWS servers to lag or timeout sometimes.
If an online game already requires a ton of processing power, imagine how much processing power a fully immersive virtual world would need. Considering that, unlike Fortnite – where the maximum number of players actually playing together is limited – in a “metaverse”, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people would have to be connected to the same cluster at the same time.
Going social
Because metaverses are not just about gaming – they want to be the next Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, all in one, with services like gaming, shopping, video, and audio streaming, and who knows what else built into it. Or at least this is how Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook Inc, imagined it.
Meta’s Metaverse will have all the entertainment and communication options currently offered by the company built right into it – it will be meant for professionals and businessmen as well as everyday users like you and me (although I can imagine it will have separate servers for business meetings and virtual concerts). But even with separate datacenters for corporate and private use, the processing power needed to run persistent virtual worlds with potentially tens of thousands, perhaps millions of concurrent users can be enormous.
And let’s not forget about the spikes in usage. The Travis Scott event we mentioned above was attended by a large number of viewers – but it was by far not the biggest virtual event. BTS’s Bang Bang Con was seen by 2.7 million concurrent users. Imagine a performer with a similar fan base performing in a metaverse – how many users would that mean?
When speaking about the upcoming Metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he hopes that it will “reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers”. For this, it will need servers of power that seem unimaginable at this time.