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Cloud Data Management for Online Games: Potentials and Open Issues

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Abstract

The number of players, for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), typically reaches millions of people, geographically distributed throughout the world. Worldwide revenues for these games increase by billions of dollars each year. Unfortunately, their complex architecture makes them hard to maintain, resulting in considerable costs and development risks. For normal operation, MMORPGs have to access huge amounts of diverse data. With increasing numbers of players, managing growing volumes of data in a relational database becomes a big challenge, which cannot be overcome by simply adding new servers. Cloud storage systems are emerging solutions focusing on providing scalability and high performance for Cloud applications, social media, etc. However, Cloud storage systems are in general not designed for processing transactions or providing high levels of consistency. In this paper, we present our current work-in-progress by analyzing the existing architecture of MMORPGs and classifying relevant data. Based on this, we highlight the design requirements, identify the major research challenges, and propose a Cloud-based model for MMORPGs that we currently implement as a testbed for further evaluation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Technical and Business Information Systems, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Universitätsplatz 2, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany

    Ziqiang Diao, Eike Schallehn, Shuo Wang & Siba Mohammad

Authors
  1. Ziqiang Diao
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  2. Eike Schallehn
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  3. Shuo Wang
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  4. Siba Mohammad
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ziqiang Diao.

Additional information

This is an extended version of the paper “Cloud Data Management for Online Games: Potentials and Open Issues” selected for the special DASP issue Best Workshop Papers of BTW 2013 [1].

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Diao, Z., Schallehn, E., Wang, S. et al. Cloud Data Management for Online Games: Potentials and Open Issues. Datenbank Spektrum 13, 179–188 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-013-0142-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-013-0142-x

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