ButterFly.net Announce New Online Platform News

IBM and <ahref=http://www.butterfly.net>ButterFly.net</a> today announced a new platform for online games and that they have reached an agreement with Sony Corporation to provide the platform for online Playstation2 titles.<br><br>The ButterFly technology negates the problems associated with hosting online games by utilising a ‘grid computing’ technique to link multiple servers into one virtual supercomputer, which can seamlessly switch processing tasks between the individual machines.<br><br>Butterfly claim that this technique will create a more reliable and stable platform for online games, and will publicly showcase PS2 games running across the system at next weeks Game Developers Conference.<br><br>In addition to the improved stability, the platform houses a number of features which are similar to Xbox Live!; gamers could have one single identity on the system, much like the GamerTag from Xbox Live!. Despite the added functionality, the developer will always remain in control of the content and not have to subscribe to the closed environment utilised by Microsoft.<br><br>With all of this talk about ‘grid computing’ and ‘distributed processing’ a picture is certainly emerging about the direction Sony wish to take for the future of gaming; we’ll have more information from the GDC.