A SimCity Update

Question: If it takes 1 server to handle 1,000 clients, how many servers does it take to handle 1,000,000 clients?

Answer: Between 1 and infinity. It might not even be physically possible to serve 1,000,000 clients, depending on the application.

Apparently this group is group is not actually that big/influential and/or there is a significant group of people who pirate regardless of developer goodwill, etc.

As such, it is potentially also possible to scale up to 200 or 500%, giving even more users a chance to play. I don't expect it to scale linearly with the added hardware, but it will help a bit.

From a technical standpoint, I've learned somethings (from which I'm drawing my conclusions. Bear with me) about their problem:

0) the architecture is hosted on Amazons infrastructure

1) as part of their mitigation, they have turned off the ability to increase simulation speed. This points to a lack of CPU resources on the application servers or a lack of io resources on the backend database to keep up with the increased rate of changes to the data model. However, I've heard from various comments that they might not actually be storing all that state on-the-fly but syncing it at the end of the session at which point the db load would be independent of simulation speed.

I'm inclined to think that CPU starvation on the app servers was likely the reason why they disabled cheetah speed.

Adding more frontend CPU power is quite trivially done by adding more app servers and having each of them deal with fewer concurrent users. In the end, they could use one app server per region (= 10ish cities. Not all of them necessarily being played concurrently) without having to do a lot of additional work in synchronizing region state between machines.

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347611 was talking about database io issues. This is of course a problem you can't just solve by adding more machines as many databases can't easily scale horizontally.

The way how sim city works though lends itself very well to sharding: run regions independently and balance them across multiple machines. Add more machines and rebalance shards (with downtime if you have to, but people weren't able to play anyways)

This is all the information I had to build my opinion on. I did however reflect upon these facts before posting my opinion by which I stand even now.

Being able to scale 130% in a week, having an easily shardable problem and having frontend server CPU starvation tells me personally, that adding more machines could be possible (but maybe not economically feasible).

Of course it's guesswork in the end. But writing these half-technical articles like the submission I linked above do invite guesswork. As long as one has at least some facts to start with, a discussion is still warranted. I have no problem in being proven wrong by additional facts, a different interpretation of the facts or just one article that goes beyond trying to convert PR speech into technical facts (above linked article)

2) Most of the "fervent anti-DRM crowd" are actually the people who pay for the games. Real pirates could care less about traditional DRM schemes; they could always circumvent them until now.

3) As algorias already mentioned there are multiple communities in gaming. I'm sure video game piracy stats also greatly vary by country. I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the worst in Asia (excluding Japan) due to the culture.

In fact, there's little evidence this is so for most games. It makes sense that a game that can be pirated will be so by a higher number of people than those who pay for it, but this alone does not support the conclusion that the rates of purchase for a game that is extensively pirated are necessarily lower than if that wasn't the case.

In the case of The Witcher 2, after the patch that removed the onerous SecuROM DRM fully 4 million additional copies of the game have been purchased to date, compared to around 1 million copies total purchased during the few months after release while the DRM was still in place.