Rubin described the obstacles to having dedicated servers in an interview at GamesCom 2013, stating, ”One of the problems with our game, in a sense, is that we have so many players.”
He revealed that the publisher ”looked into dedicated servers on console when (they) were developing Call of Duty 4, and the problem was that (they) could only fit four (multiplayer) games onto each server.” Rubin added, ”So, you times that by how many games were being played, and it was going to come out to be more servers than every data center in the United States. It would have been impossible to do.”
Since Call of Duty 4’s launch in 2007, server tech has been improved to a great degree.
”Obviously the power of the servers grew, and we can fit more and more instances per server, which has helped a bit, and the fact now that Microsoft is supporting this huge cloud initiative, dedicated servers make a ton more sense. We’ll have scalability, and we’re not having to run data centers which we’re not necessarily equipped to do. Having Microsoft do that is fantastic,” he explained.
Rubin raved about the Xbox Cloud as well, ”(Microsoft) has phenomenally good intentions with what they want to do with it. If you look at Call of Duty 2 when we first launched on Xbox 360, or Call of Duty 4 which was a massive leap forward compared to CoD 2, there’s a learning curve for all of us as developers, and for Xbox themselves. There’s going to be a learning curve as the console comes out. It’s totally expected, and something we’re excited about. Knowing that they’re just going to get better–for me, that’s a great thing to look forward to.”
Call of Duty: Ghosts will be released for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U on the 5th November 2013. The next-gen versions will be launch titles.
