this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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If anything this reflects badly upon Microsoft's cloud business. Dynamically spinning up enough servers shouldn't be an issue nowadays.
It's a consistent issue for Microsoft releases. You would think a company that sells cloud services would be capable of having a smooth launch.
There is a nearly zero percent chance that the game developers are also cloud experts. Having the same parent company means almost nothing, especially when you get to the size of places like Microsoft. The internal bureaucracy can actually make getting things accomplished properly worse. External contracts are usually pretty clear on what's provided for the payment. Internal processes are often much more blurry, if not completely muddy.
Well yeah, that's why you would put some cloud experts on the project besides the game devs if you're doing things like this. It's not just game developers working on the game.
Doesn't even have to be people feom the Azure team. Microsoft has plenty of resources to teach someone to be a cloud expert in other branches, they even offer certifications for outside people, surely they can manage a few of their own.
That's the problem then, they should have hired some cloud experts if they're selling a cloud-first service as a "game".
When your game is a streaming service, you better put some cloud experts on the dev team.
One might argue this kind of thing is inevitable when your solution to everything is "the cloud".
Reminds me of Amazon Games' disastrous MMO launches in Europe because they refused to add more server capacity for European players until they left in droves. For comparison the US servers had more than three times as much capacity at launch.
According to Asobo, this issue was caused by a cache that was overloaded and constantly restarting. This was used in part of the authentication process, I believe when they check what content you have. This explains why people had missing content if they were lucky enough to get in. This was my experience - got in after a very long load time and then couldn’t really do anything due to missing content.
This doesn’t seem like it’s a Microsoft cloud issue per se, it seems like Asobo had a single point of failure in the design that didn’t scale well. Today seems like the CDN limits are finally being reached, as it took a while to load up new areas. Getting into the game was no issue, though.
Hey you! You with your logic and reasoning and reading the issue notes from developers. You aren't a real gamer, get out of here with that! We're here to dogpile on a new game here!
From the point of view of a customer, the exact failure method is irrelevant.
Microsoft took a lot of money and wasn't able to deliver what was promised in exchange.
Doesn't mean I'm not a forgiving person who understands problems happen. At this point, if you expect a game to work perfectly you can't buy day 1. Software is too complex to not expect any bugs day 1.
the cloud services are probably fine, their willingness to actually use the resources for a game may not be.
The asset streaming requirements are insane- they recommend having a 150mbps connection for a smooth experience with 50mbps as a minimum. Microsoft says they only planned for 250k players at launch, which is stupid considering FS 2020 had over a million sales at launch...
✋ Hi, person here who bought 2020 but refuses to buy 2024 because they didn't deliver on half their promises for 2020, including that it would be the last sim they sold.
Maybe they were suprised this many people actually signed up for their next level bullshit. 🤷♂️
Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the "last Windows," too. We know how their track record goes on that.
I've had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it's served me pretty damn well so far.
Iirc, they didn't. There was one person who didn't really have the authority to make such claims say something that could have been understood as win 10 is the last windows.
I hate to defend Microsoft, they're an awful company, but this just was never really true.
Your not wrong. I worked for the company, and we were told that it wasn't actually true like 6 months after launch. I had been communicating it for .o the to my clients.
"This is the last time, baby. I swear!"
Same. I'm still pissed that 2020 was left in the state it is in with tons of its own bugs and missing features that were promised. I remember talking to a friend and saying that MSFS2020 was a cool flight sim but still had the vibe of an early-access game at times... and then they drop an announcement for 2024.
Why hand out bug fixes for free when you can charge full price once more instead?
I bet the beancounters don't like keeping excess capacity ready to go
Scaling capacity up and down in real time should be Microsoft's core business now.
I'd say it's more on how the developers setup their system to utilize (or not utilize) those dynamic capabilities.
The game devs not taking advantage of that properly should be on them. Put the blame where it belongs.Don't let the devs off the hook just because you want to at least partially blame the MS cloud. Microsoft's systems CAN handle dynamic loads when setup properly, we see it all the time.