Hi there! I'm the founder of Agones, so wanted to give some additional perspective.
GCGS provides a lot of functionality over the top of Agones. The big win here is that while Agones works great within a single Kubernetes cluster, it requires a lot of manual work to orchestrate across multiple clusters.
This is what Google Cloud Game Servers brings to the table - flexible ways to orchestrate and manage multiple Agones clusters around the world, and the Fleets of warm Game Servers on them.
We also work really hard so that is it's easy to move from open source Agones -> GCGS, but also move back out of you no longer want our management layer.
There's more stuff on top of that, but I hope that helps clear things up
Oh yeah, I didn't mean it to be a knock against Agones, more that there seemed to be a fair amount of marketing speak in the google copy("supercharged", "Companies like Activision Blizzard are benefiting from our ... artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities") and it wasn't clear what the value was.
Honestly, your comment is much clearer than most of the linked article.
If you want to learn more about this in person, in 2020 there will be the first "Online Game Technology Summit" at the Game Developers Conference.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the summit advisors)
We're trying to grow the education in this space of game development, because currently it is very sparse. AFAIK, this is the only event that is dedicated to the technical aspects of online, connected or multiplayer games.
So happy to see this happening! I've also been advocating for more community development and knowledge sharing in this space. I believe there's a huge unfulfilled need to connect the industry more on these topics. I've also been organizing an event in the space, and looking at the possibility to land a special interest group in larger organizations that can support our community. I'll drop you a line!
I'm probably gonna submit a talk to this summit this year! Been going to GDC as a volunteer since 2005, I've always wanted to talk more about online services development for sometime. So glad to see this happening!
In response to this - afaik, there is no evidence that Pokemon Go is running stateful game simulation servers for their game, especially those that would power something like an FPS or MMO (They may be, but I've not seen any public evidence of it), which is what I'm referring to in this article. Sounds like I should have been clearer on this point, as you aren't the first to point this out.
Yeah, i never implied the Pokemon GO server was stateful (and it definitely isn't) in the way that other MMOs/FPSs that require persistent connections are. However, you can't say that it isn't a "game server".
I looked through comments to see if anyone had pointed it out and didn't see anything. Figured maybe you'd be interested to know that Kubernetes was used for something so massive. My bad.
No worries - and thanks for pointing it out (I meant you weren't the first person to say this to me). It's worth the clarification.
It's an interesting differentiation in vocabulary between the games industry and what would be the wider technical community, in my experience - a "game server" is a simulation server when talking about it in the games industry. I should have made a note of that in the previous article.
