Gaming has been a giant industry ever since its inception. With the advent of cloud technology, the capacity of computing required for hosting a resource-intensive game of any genre, from massive multiplayer online role playing games to individual point and shoot scenarios, has also increased manifold. To cater specifically to the increased demand for computing resources, dedicated servers are set up.
Dedicated servers for Steam allow game developers to launch and control their games through root access without investing heavily in costly on-premises infrastructure. A Steam dedicated server can be custom-built so that the influx of players and administrators can be handled without significant latency or connectivity hiccups. Using SteamDB and SteamCMD, developers access and modify their game code to add features and remove bugs. Both Windows and Linux
operating systems have their own dedicated servers for Steam.
Valve Corporation uses the Steam engine primarily for game server provision, monitoring and support, but also includes features that fall into digital rights management and content delivery, among others. The usage of a dedicated server for Steam allows computer memory to be freed up for game utilization, in addition to improving the multitasking ability of the processor for the machine on which the dedicated server is being run.
Communities of players benefit tremendously from
dedicated server hosting. For upcoming as well as established game developers and players alike, dedicated servers for Steam provide cost savings in the long run. Controlling the myriad aspects of a multiplayer open world game is a behemoth task, but dedicated servers take full advantage of the advancements in computing technology to make the task customizable and user friendly, and the gaming experience smooth and immersive.