*MOVED* Note, I am no longer going to be moving off-topic posts. From now on, I will just delete them
It seems EA think thousand player instances can be done using cloud servers. Interesting.
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2018/10/ea-has-over-1000-staff-working-on-cloud-gaming/
A simple example given was the battle royale genre. Games tend to have a maximum of 100 players due to the current constraints of consoles and gaming PCs, but relying on cloud computing could - in theory - overcome those technical restrictions to enable grander experiences. "Thousands of players could compete on a single map hundreds or thousands of kilometers wide, in a game session that could last for days, weeks, or years and with the progression and persistence of realistic seasons and campaigns," Moss said.
Except, this has never been in dispute because that's how MMO games are designed from the ground up; hence the "massively" part. Big worlds, seamlessly stitched together to give the impression of scale isn't rocket science. Eve Online does it, though at a smaller scale and their game isn't real-time twitch based. ED does it just fine - and they use cloud tech to do it. LoD does it - though I use linked hardware servers instead of cloud instances.
Also, that wasn't the claim that Chris and Erin made. Their claim was "thousands of players on a single server". You
do know the difference, right?
ps: You did notice the "
in theory" part of that statement, right?