By way of Joystiq, comes a report that Electronic Arts will stop supporting online game services for 49 games in their catalog. Granted, these games are "older", but some are games that I still play today. The reason for this, some speculate, is the cost of maintaining servers for each of the old games is no longer justified by the dwindling number of consumers playing said games.

This is the perfect scenario for Project Darkstar due to our game agnostic approach. If these games were built on the Project Darkstar platform, then the games could continue their online services due to the ability of running multiple games in the same server. So what if there are only 10 people playing each game at peak? We could have a server handling 490 players across all of those games and the cost to keep the games alive, and customers happy, would be very inexpensive compared to today's model of separate infrastructure/support for each title. A model which is common in today's online game market.

This is a common concept in utility computing, but a rather new approach in the world of online games. We are pioneering this model with Project Darkstar and see this growing into a new market segment in the world of online game services. It is a very cool time to be involved in building online game technology.