Online gaming is the world’s largest entertainment industry by revenue, and supports over 3 billion consumers worldwide. Many of the world’s most popular online games must manage millions of concurrent players through a single unified service. Achieving performant and scalable online games is challenging. Online games are subject to stringent quality of service requirements, notably extremely low response times, with at most 50ms being considered acceptable. Unlike many other types of applications, the performance of online games depends to a large degree on the resources available on end-user devices. These devices are typically heterogeneous, limited in compute and network resources, and subject to unpredictable changes in resource availability.
Addressing this challenge, we propose in this work the concept of differentiated deployment, which allows online games to selectively manage and scale online-game systems with fine granularity in response to changes in available resources. We design Polka, a framework for online games which supports differentiated deployment. We then implement PolkaDOTS, an open-source proof of concept of the Polka framework built in an industry standard game development ecosystem.
We evaluate our approach using Dither, a custom-built experiment runner for large scale distributed experiments on online games. We use Dither to perform real-world experiments on a representative Minecraft-like Game, Opencraft 2, built on the PolkaDOTS stack, and analyze the impact of various differentiated deployment scenarios. From these experiments, we find that differentiated deployment can decrease performance variability of online-game servers, and decrease the response time experienced by players by up to 32%. Most importantly, we show that differentiated deployment enables novel deployment techniques, including switching from local rendering to cloud-based rendering (i.e., cloud gaming) at runtime.