14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world. Its presence in the gaming industry also means that a lot of the projects from its rivals may seem a bit small compared to the ones underway at the large corporation which, even though the recession hasn't made its life easy, still has money left for research and development.
It seems that its plans are once again being shifted into the public spotlight thanks to a job posting the corporation has made public on several websites. After one calling for a developer for a complete Halo experience, the Redmond-based company is now looking for a server developer who can help create the framework for a 300,000 player online game.
The job listing calls for “an experienced server developer to help develop our server architecture. We are building an extremely high performance system to extend console games to the server in new ways; creating a completely new set of web services to support dynamic programming information of games and scheduling data.”
Part of this endeavor will be a gameplay scheduler for Xbox Live users who can agree on times to meet online. A very important requirement for the game is “building a backend capable of hosting a 300,000 player game in real-time with real money on the line (anti-cheating, etc)”
So, it appears that due to the fact that online games are among the few guaranteed money makers in the gaming industry during these tough times, Microsoft wants a big piece of that. Whether or not its project will be feasible is still up to anyone's choice. Hopefully, the company will shed some light on it during its keynote at the E3 conference, today, in front of all the gaming press.