Mammoth Media have produced an interesting guide to dedicated server software for games. They argue that games developers can better serve their customers by releasing dedicated server software that customers, or 3rd parties can install. In particular, the guide suggests that allowing ISPs to provision dedicated servers can improve customer experience, and alleviate demand at the game developers’ own servers. This makes; you might not want (especially in Australia, where Mammoth Media is based) to suffer the latency of a long-haul link to a data centre somewhere on another continent, or the other side of the continent. It also makes sense when trying to provision very high demand when games are launched. Of course, releasing the server software means that the games developer has lost some control of the quality of the user experience; games servers can be hacked and customers can get annoyed very quickly.