Mark Rubin of Infinity Ward talks dedicated servers for Call of Duty

It seems Call of Duty may have been too broad an experience for most sever architectures. Mark Rubin assures that now, with the help of Microsoft's cloud initiative, that dedicated servers will be available on the Xbox One.



“We looked into dedicated servers on console when we were developing Call of Duty 4, and the problem was that we could only fit four [multiplayer] games onto each server. So, you times that by how many games were being played, and it was going to come out to be more servers than every data center in the United States. It would have been impossible to do,” Rubin said.

Over the years, fans have shouted and complained about the absence of dedicated servers in the series's multiplayer.

“Obviously the power of the servers grew, and we can fit more and more instances per server, which has helped a bit, and the fact now that Microsoft is supporting this huge cloud initiative, dedicated servers make a ton more sense. We’ll have scalability, and we’re not having to run data centers which we’re not necessarily equipped to do. Having Microsoft do that is fantastic."

Realising that ISP's would also need to upgrade their own infrastructure now that online gaming has taken off as it has was crucial. Their cooperation is proving invaluable to video game studios like Infinity Ward.
“The infrastructure, the internet service producers, have all realised that and are starting to formulate their strategies for how they run their business around multiplayer social gaming. I remember on Call of Duty 4 we have problems in Europe because some of the ISPs here were bandwidth limiting video game traffic."

“We fought and fought with those guys, and literally sent people to those companies trying to explain what’s going on, and fortunately today I think it’s a significantly improved environment.”

Source: Gamespot