How are video game servers created and why do some work better than others?
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There are various kind of game servers that will serve different purposes, and it depends on the way the game is setup.
With some games, the server is doing a lot of the logic. In a game like World of Warcraft, your client is just sending instructions to the server about what movement you’re doing and what abilities you’re using, and then the server handles all the logic of the effects, like deciding how much damage you did to an enemy.
With other games like Destiny, the servers are handling connecting players together, but then the players directly connect to one another and handle their interaction that way. One player gets randomly chosen for their client to handle stuff like enemy AI logic, reducing the need for persistent servers. Servers will still do things like handle “I killed an enemy” events and generate rewards, but they do so asynchronously to the actual gameplay.
Some of these kinds of servers have more load that will scale up with more players, and you can’t really use any kind of autoscaling very well without adding another layer on top of all of it. The ones that can scale nicely will tend to do better.
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