this makes me sad. I've been following Glenn on Twitter for a few years. I like his writing on netcode. I'm a multiplayer server engineer at my dayjob.
The crux of this system is that the amount of benefit you get out of it is a function of how much money you put into it. I can't believe that he would say ... this, of all things:
> What happening that I think is terrible is that the public Internet is turning into this neglected commons
He's directly creating a platform that exacerbates that very problem by finding loopholes in how network neutrality policy is structured to create fast lanes. This in turn will create incentives for providers to put their most performant systems on private networks and their least performant systems on the public internet. The greater the gap in performance between the public internet and the services of Network Next, the more valuable Network Next is. It's a feedback loop that will print money. It's a brilliant act of capitalism that is doomed to succeed at the expense of the already-sparse indie multiplayer scene.
> What happening that I think is terrible is that the public Internet is turning into this neglected commons
This is a past tense. It has already happened. What if indie games could access the same benefits of something like Riot Direct, democratized so they can use it at a reasonable price without having to build 10s of millions of dollars worth of their own private network infrastructure?
Where we're doing at Network Next is democratizing access to the private networks, not creating more of them.
I think it has a very good chance of succeeding, and I think it's a very smart business strategy. I know who you are, and I know what your work means in the game industry. And honestly I've learned a lot from your writing and talks, and if you get filthy rich, well, you've put in the work and if anyone deserves it, sure, great.
It strikes me as odd to describe your actions as "democratizing access" when what you're doing is basically the textbook definition of market making. Markets structure access by capital; democracies are ideally structured to provide equal access that is unrelated to participants' access to capital. By transforming private networks into fungible commodities, you will ideally raise the utilization of said private networks and in turn raise the return on investment of building such networks.
You say you're not creating more private networks, but again, I think this is a useful turn of phrase that is not representative of the consequences of your actions. Even when you're not making more private networks yourself, if you build an efficient market for commodifying access to private networks, shouldn't that create incentives for others to create new private networks? I'm not questioning your motives; I'm questioning what the consequences of your actions will be.
Since the bill here is footed by the game developer (and not the player), the cost barrier that indies face in making multiplayer games is further tilted in the favor of AAA studios. In short: great for AAA studios since it makes it harder for smaller studios to compete, great for private network operators since it provides liquidity, great for gamers that want to play AAA multiplayer games, bad for indie game studios because it will widen the latency gap between public and private networks, bad for gamers that want to play indie multiplayer games.
The end result of this appears to be a system whose consequence will be to create market forces that encourage the centralization of capital and the creation of new private networks, while also adversely affecting the landscape of which game developers are capable of creating latency-sensitive multiplayer games. That is what I find concerning.
I understand your concerns but it's too expensive to create a private network just for games. Nobody is going to do this.
What we do is open up existing private networks and resell excess capacity on them. There's more than enough excess capacity on existing private networks to satisfy the needs of game traffic, and we create a neutral marketplace that opens this up so game traffic can go across these networks.
Think of this in terms of turning cloud backbones, CDN private networks into carriers of game traffic... nobody is going to build a private network for games, the traffic volumes are just too small.
The crux of this system is that the amount of benefit you get out of it is a function of how much money you put into it. I can't believe that he would say ... this, of all things:
> What happening that I think is terrible is that the public Internet is turning into this neglected commons
He's directly creating a platform that exacerbates that very problem by finding loopholes in how network neutrality policy is structured to create fast lanes. This in turn will create incentives for providers to put their most performant systems on private networks and their least performant systems on the public internet. The greater the gap in performance between the public internet and the services of Network Next, the more valuable Network Next is. It's a feedback loop that will print money. It's a brilliant act of capitalism that is doomed to succeed at the expense of the already-sparse indie multiplayer scene.