The infra was on-prem, so it was planned in advance and ops folks who had on-call rotations every day etc & that was rented out by the hour to the game teams (a

The infra was on-prem, so it was planned in advance and ops folks who had on-call rotations every day etc & that was rented out by the hour to the game teams (a chargeback model). The salaries and hardware cost was paid for even if the games had a bust. The period where it worked well, the games had boom-bust in somewhat controlled fashion where farmville -> cityville -> frontierville -> fishville etc, the traffic would move around rather than die down entirely. The world turned mobile-heavy and that whole pipeline fell apart while they were restructuring into mobile games (words with friends etc), when the hardware had to be sold or the payments would start to hurt.