T-minus 1 million players and counting: A cautionary tale for online developers

Another day, another story about an online game that failed at launch due to scalability problems. This time it’s Evolution Studio’s racing sim Driveclub, but this is hardly the first that went down on launch day. These issues are not even limited to games. Remember the Healthcare.gov debacle?

Why does this keep happening? Because, frankly, building systems that scale is really, really hard, and it’s something schools almost never teach.