Dedicated servers for previous Call of Duty titles was impossible due to number of players

In an interview with GameSpot, Mark Rubin spoke about why dedicated servers hasn’t been part of the franchise for some time. He said that IW has been looking into the idea of dedicated servers since Call of Duty 4, but they just couldn’t have enough servers for the number of players that play Call of Duty.

“One of the problems with our game, in a sense, is that we have so many players,” said Rubin. “I remember that we looked into dedicated servers on console when we were developing Call of Duty 4, and the problem was that we could only fit four [multiplayer] games onto each server. 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.”

“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.”

Rubin went to say that it’s ‘fantastic’ that Microsoft is doing what they are with the Xbox LIVE Cloud features; giving the developers what they need to have dedicated servers.

“So the infrastructure, the internet service producers, have all realised that and are starting to formulate their strategies for how they run their business around multiplayer social gaming. I remember on Call of Duty 4 we have problems in Europe because some of the ISPs here were bandwidth limiting video game traffic. We fought and fought with those guys, and literally sent people to those companies trying to explain what’s going on, and fortunately today I think it’s a significantly improved environment.”

SOURCE: GameSpot