It's not as ludicrous as you think, for two reasons:

1. Bandwidth requirements scale quadratically with player count, since the state of each player needs to be broadcast to every player. You can optimize this with clever tricks like server-side occlusion culling, but that's heavily dependent on your specific game's mechanics, and it still doesn't address the worst case scenario of lots of players clustering in a small visible area.

2. Players are not the only entity that need to be synced. Every server-side entity affecting a client needs to have its state broadcast to that client. A dynamically destructible environment that physically interacts with players is a perfect example of this - launch a rocket at a building, compute the Voronoi fractures server-side based on impact location, sync thousands of pieces of flying concrete debris (each with its own rigid body) across all players.

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frollogaston 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Every server-side entity affecting a client needs to have its state broadcast to that client" is true, but you're presuming all those entities are going to be server-side, which in most cases they're not.

Yes I can imagine if you put all the state on the server and broadcast all that to the clients, you can easily use 20mbps for a massive game, more like 200mbps. Would also imagine it'd be insanely laggy, and not because of the bandwidth itself. At that point you're probably better off just streaming the video, cause at least clients can uh "parse" that quickly.

	▲	gafferongames 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A typical quake style FPS netcode like Counterstrike, Apex Legends, Titanfall etc. would have all gameplay affecting objects (bullets, missiles props whatever...) as server side entities. On the client these entities are usually interpolated, except the local player character, which has client-side prediction (eg. optimistic execution with rollback to apply server corrections to maintain server authority). So it's not at all unusual to suggest that all gameplay affecting objects would be server-side. In this network model, that is the default approach. The exception would be for entirely cosmetic FX or cosmetic debris objects that don't push back on the player.

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Stevvo 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

2. Is an absurd example. That is not how you do networked physics in 2026. You use jolt for cross-platform determinism with rollback, replicating only inputs.

	▲	gafferongames 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Deterministic cross-platform networking with jolt is fine and good, but there are multiple ways to network a game, and even to do networked physics in 2026. I hope your game world is small, and your player count is low, otherwise: 1) your server will be waiting for inputs from the most lagged player, 2) you will become entirely CPU bound on the client performing all this rollback. Approaches that don't suffer from these two problems send state, yes they send a lot more bandwidth, but they scale better as the number of players n increases.

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xboxnolifes 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It does not scale quadratically per client though, and the number given is per client.

	▲	gafferongames 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let's say typical games send 1-2 megabits per-second for first person shooters with 100 players or less (in some cases it's more, some cases it's less, but let's assume this is at least reasonable to do in 2026) Now you have a game with 1000 players. That's 10 times the number of objects in the world (players have to be sent to other players, assuming you can see all the other players because they are right near you.) Now this game sends 10-20megabits per-second. It's just math. More players --> more bandwidth.

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8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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