Sun Microsystems is getting into the MMO game: with a little chest-thumping they just announced (probably quite rightly) that their "massively multiplayer" experience of running Wall Street's trading systems probably qualifies them rather highly for running an MMO's back end.

So they're going to release some MMO middleware. Sun Gaming Server's SDK is out next year, and their Chief Gaming Officer (what a great title!) describes his service thus:

I can go to an operator that has built an infrastructure to handle 5 million concurrent players. I don't care if it is one game running 5 million players or it's a 100 games handling 50,000 players each or 1,000 games running 5,000 players each. It's the first solution that's able to do [all] this.

Five million concurrent? Whew! How many in proximity, though, is what we all want to know. Hey, if he can fix Orgrimmar lag, well....

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