3 ms·
... no, not everything is scalable, nor does everything benefit from economies of scale. This does benefit from economies of scale, but it’s not something you
by b_tterc_p 8y ago
... no, not everything is scalable, nor does everything benefit from economies of scale.
This does benefit from economies of scale, but it’s not something you can just solve with infrastructure and fixed cost. No matter how many computers you have, you’re still going to do multiple orders of magnitude more calculations to render high end games than stream a song. And you’re going to deal with difficult load balances because every twelve year old gets home from school at the same time (exaggeration but point stands). GPU time costs money.
- diminoten 8y agoThis benefits massively from economies of scale, and yes it is very much something you can solve with infrastructure and fixed cost. Fundamentally it doesn't matter if you're streaming a song or streaming a game. GPU time costs money but it's a fixed cost, doesn't matter what the GPU time is being used for, therefore it won't be per-game. The end.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoIt’s only a fixed cost if the computers must be running at all times. That’s not the case. GPUs consume power, and require energy to cool. They also burn out over time and need to be replaced. For similar reasons, you’re not just going to rake in the money mining bitcoin because you bought a bunch of computers. Or maybe to make the point even stupider, you could make a game about training neural networks same as you would on a real cloud service provider. If you can understand why google doesn’t charge a simple monthly flat fee for cloud computing of neural nets, you can understand why they can’t charge a simple monthly fee for computing neural nets in a game.