Computer gaming has been growing in scope and popularity for 40 years, and the growth in massively multiplayer online games presents opportunities and challenges for the industry. Games regularly have budgets of over $30 million and infrastructure components like networking are rarely reused. Gaming has expanded to younger, larger and less technical audiences, and they are less forgiving of instability than the traditional gaming audience.

In this presentation from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Office of Sun Microsystems relates this history and future of the gaming industry and how Sun's Project Darkstar meets many of the biggest challenges facing the development of future online games.  Project Darkstar is an open source platform for developing massively multiplayer online games.  It brings the same enterprise level scalability, performance, persistence, and data integrity that Sun's corporate clients enjoy.  It also provides new business opportunities because it is game and client agnostic, so browser, desktop, and console clients can play together.  The ultimate goal is to let the next great idea bubble up from the game development community instead of being suppressed by budget and technical requirements.