The Challenge

  • Posted by wangmin
  • on January 18, 2010 08:43


BioWare is well-recognized for its leadership in role-playing gamesRecently, the company decided to expand its business model by entering the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) gaming, in which thousands of players interact with one another in a virtual worldThe pending release of this MMO game has the potential to convert a large percentage of BioWare's loyal fans into paying subscribers, while also attracting many new fans from the rapidly growing pool of MMO game players worldwide.

To support a world-class MMO experience, BioWare understood that they needed to ensure their platform offered robust scalability and persistence capabilities to store, process and query large volumes of data.

 In particular:

1) The MMO architecture would need to scale to support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous events;
2) The simulation of dynamic objects in MMO games requires support for a virtually infinite set of player interactions.While there is a powerful "Not Invented Here" bias in thegaming software industry, BioWare's management realized thatthe internal development of such a robust and scalableenvironment would be a daunting, expensive and timeconsumingproject that would threaten the success of their MMO launch and overall business plans.