AKKA: how to build a server for an MMO strategy game

What the talk is about

Oleksandr Zveriev explains how a small team built a server for an MMO strategy game in about six months using the actor model with Akka (the .NET version), while the client runs on Unity. The core idea: instead of manual synchronization of data access, which causes hard-to-find bugs and unpredictable performance, every game object (kingdom, player, march) becomes an actor that processes messages one at a time and shares no state. This scales well, confines failures to a single player, and lets the database restart without stopping the game. State is stored as snapshots plus an append-only log of events. The speaker notes that the technology makes hiring easier and onboarding faster, but actors are hard to unit-test and real-load data was not yet available. Useful for server developers and tech leads of online games.