Gaming Consoles and IPv4

Thu Oct 1 15:25:20 UTC 2020

> On Sep 30, 2020, at 11:41 , Daniel Sterling <sterling.daniel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 30, 2020 at 12:47 PM Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> Games want to go peer-to-peer.
> 
> That was true up until about 2012.
> 
> As Martijn Schmidt noted, Activison contracts out to multiple managed
> hosting companies to provide servers across the globe. If you launch
> any recent call of duty game and hit "multiplayer"  , your system will
> be looking for a managed server host to connect to.

Sure, but… Mostly they want to use that managed server to get pointed to other players
and form up a game… Once they launch the actual game, most games move as much of the inter-player
traffic to peer-to-peer. Exceptions include MMORPG and similar where the model
just isn’t suited to peer-to-peer anyway.

>> From 2013 and on, all the call of duty games are
> managed-server-host-only for general multiplayer. You have to go well
> out of your way to do P2P FPS gaming recently -- at least with CoD.
> not sure about other games.

CoD if it truly operates that way is more an exception than the rule. Most of the FPS,
racing, simulation, etc. games I’m aware of use rendezvous servers for meetup/indexing
and (in some cases) as a last resort when peer to peer doesn’t work for whatever reason.

> 
>> The real question IMHO is why are game console companies so stupid about IPv6?
> 
> Just a guess, but I imagine since they can't count on users having v6,
> their hosts have to support v4 and they don't bother making them
> dual-stack.

Yeah, not entirely true. X-Box one had a clever solution for this. (It’s so uncomfortable
for me to be holding Micr0$0ft out as a good example here). If you had v6, great,
use it. If you didn’t have v6, then the v4 support was some form of IPv6 tunnel to their server
and the game portion still ran native IPv6.

Since most game packets are very very small (otoo 64 octets or so and almost never
more than 512 octets), PMTU and tunnel overhead is usually not a problem.

I thought this model was awesome because it meant that there was an actual consumer
advantage to having IPv6 and as word got out, it would provide incentive for ISPs
to provide it and for consumers to upgrade their CPE to support it.

Somewhat surprised other consoles didn’t emulate this.

Owen