Blizzard, AT&T Sign Multimillion Dollar Hosting Deal
AT&T will sport the hosting for World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III.
Wednesday AT&T said that it reached an agreement with Blizzard that expands their current ten-year relationship. In a new multimillion dollar, multi-year, multi-services contract, Blizzard will use AT&T's Enterprise Hosting Services in North America for World of WarCraft and the upcoming StarCraft and Diablo franchises.
AT&T said that it will also provide voice and data services for Global Call Center Support, the backbone behind Blizzard's call centers around the world including the U.S., Europe, and Asia. "Multiple voice services, domestic and international, to support gamers’ customer service calls, and billing are now supported by AT&T’s global network," the company said.
In addition to the servers and call center support, the contract also allows AT&T to provide its Intelligent Content Distribution service, a network-based Content Distribution Network service that will "quickly and reliably" transmit patches and content updates to the players.
AT&T's Gaming Core Team, originally launched back in 2004 to meet the infrastructure needs of gaming operations on AT&T's IP network, will monitor and manage the technology infrastructure powering Blizzard's games on a proactive, 24/7 basis.
"Over the years, AT&T has demonstrated that it understands the needs of our business," said Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "The services and support AT&T provides have helped us to consistently deliver high-quality online-gaming experiences to our players."
The big fish always eats the smaller fish, when they are the same size the band together. :s
I'm of the same mind. The only reason I raise a skeptical eyebrow is due to the fact that AT&T has a tendency to bite off more than they can chew in regards to their network infrastructure, iPhone anyone? With Blizzard's growth, and soon to be released SC2, will we see an increase in users which will negatively impact AT&T's networks? I hope not, but I'm wary.
Wireless != Wired
AT&T's 3g network sucks because GSM wasn't really designed for an entire city worth of apple fans to click "refresh" on the apple homepage repeatedly until something new about the iPad shows up.
As someone who has worked on site on their hosting facilities, I can say that their wired network is sufficiently massive. What do you think they are doing with all that connectivity that used to carry landline phone calls? As for their services, rest assured they spare no expense when they build out a hosting site; they have close to 100 of them across the US which is something unheard of for any hosting company that's not also a telco.
If the Death Star company can't make this work, it needs to be Yamato'ed!
It looks like they are already IN a contract, just expanding it. And Blizzard does not have many network issues that I can find. Play WoW quite a bit with the wife and son, can't recall a time there was an issue with server connections that was not my ISPs fault.
Mzima, they already host the WoW datacenter in Seattle. (=
Likely Verizon (now that they own MCI Worldcom). Comcast isn't a major carrier so anything they contracted with to provide would be from someone else.