That's a useful technology. Second Life / Open Simulator do not have that, and need it. It's good to hear about a success with that approach.
Improbable tried that, dividing the world into regions but moving the region boundaries around based on player density. This worked, but apparently required huge amounts of inter-server traffic. The system was too expensive to operate. (Running it on Google Cloud with metering for every client/server transaction didn't help.) Five indy free to play games, some of them good (look up Worlds Adrift), went bust because of server cost.
Improbable then pivoted to simulators for the UK military, a much less cost-sensitive market. That worked, but they had way too much company and funding for that niche. Then they tried to pivot to crypto metaverses, two years too late, and hooked up with the Yuga Labs (Bored Ape, Otherside) crowd. Lately, they're trying to do something with US Major League Baseball. Their solution to the cost problem is to only run special events that last a few hours, for which they can short term rent some huge number of servers from AWS or somebody.
There's still no good off the shelf solution for this kind of scaling, with big worlds and big moving crowds. Epic and Roblox were making noises about working on this problem a year ago, but not much has been heard recently. Now both are in money-losing and layoff mode.
Improbable tried that, dividing the world into regions but moving the region boundaries around based on player density. This worked, but apparently required huge amounts of inter-server traffic. The system was too expensive to operate. (Running it on Google Cloud with metering for every client/server transaction didn't help.) Five indy free to play games, some of them good (look up Worlds Adrift), went bust because of server cost.
Improbable then pivoted to simulators for the UK military, a much less cost-sensitive market. That worked, but they had way too much company and funding for that niche. Then they tried to pivot to crypto metaverses, two years too late, and hooked up with the Yuga Labs (Bored Ape, Otherside) crowd. Lately, they're trying to do something with US Major League Baseball. Their solution to the cost problem is to only run special events that last a few hours, for which they can short term rent some huge number of servers from AWS or somebody.
There's still no good off the shelf solution for this kind of scaling, with big worlds and big moving crowds. Epic and Roblox were making noises about working on this problem a year ago, but not much has been heard recently. Now both are in money-losing and layoff mode.