4 ms·

The absolute costs of running game servers is so miniscule that for a majority of the most popular games that have less than say 10k concurrent players any give

The absolute costs of running game servers is so miniscule that for a majority of the most popular games that have less than say 10k concurrent players any given day, a company's interest payments would cover their costs several times over. I guarantee that you can run them in perpetuity. I worked for a game hosting company in my early career.

dontlaugh 4y ago
That’s not even remotely true for the vast majority of games. Just look up the cost of game servers for Rust or Ark and you’ll see it tends to be over $1 per slot. With many slots unused, the per month per player cost is only sustainable with recurring revenue like subscriptions/similar or players directly paying for game servers.
- loa_in_ 4y ago
  That's retail price, no company is paying those
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    It's not far off in terms of scale. How many hours of enough extra idle slots can a one-off game purchase pay for? For most games, it's less than average playtime. Running a process to simulate an entire game world is very expensive, far more than storing a bit of data and responding to the occasional HTTP request.
    - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
      Most game servers don't process anything when players aren't on the server, and players aren't playing all day. There are peak hours.
      - dontlaugh 4y ago
        That hardly matters, you pay for the hardware necessary to be able to accept a new connection to a slot, with the world already loaded in memory.
        andrewmcwatters 4y ago
        No, it really matters. We sold servers based on calculated loads. You make your money doing that basic math in that line of work.
        dontlaugh 4y ago
        You can optimise your costs around peak load, sure. You aren’t getting away from needing to run many game servers ready for a connection. The most cost effective way to do that is bare metal for base load, which means you can’t scale down to zero. Worse still, in a game where players choose their server, most servers will have many empty slots.
pixl97 4y ago
Public game servers are always going to be a target for hackers. Eventually libraries need updated and patched or logic exploits are discovered in the game. There is no such thing as perpetual in the computer security industry. Of course the self hosted versus company hosted equation is much different here. If the game publisher eventually just offered the server software for self hosting and freed themselves from the management burden it in theory would be much cheaper. But likely they've boxed themselves in with license deals that make this difficult.
maccard 4y ago
And I can guarantee you that this is not true. I've worked on multiple live service games in my career, and running servers for players efficiently and at scale is hard, and expensive.
- corndoge 4y ago
  Oh no! Who to believe!
- effingwewt 4y ago
  No,they are not. Especially since op mentioned most popular games having ~10k concurrent users. The added costs are studios running MMOs, and those aren't insane either. People hosted their own servers since the beginning of the net. The odd runaway hit MMO shells out more but also makes a ton more. Even then we see companies cheap out and make us sit through server queues. Live services these days amount to little more than checking license to play, loot-boxes, battlepass, etc. And yet because of those evil cash-grabs I can only play the game a few years even for single player games. Live services have become a worse dlc, as we knew it would in tge beginning.
  - maccard 4y ago
    You're arguing a strawman here, and responding with emotion to the question of "are dedicated servers for old games expensive to keep running?". I'm going to skip the rant about single player games and queues. > No,they are not. Especially since op mentioned most popular games having ~10k concurrent users. > The added costs are studios running MMOs, and those aren't insane either. People hosted their own servers since the beginning of the net. Do you know how much it costs to run an online game? Assuming we're not talking about MMOs (because you're the one who said the added costs are studios for MMOs), a game with 10k peak concurrent users, and 10 players per session will need 1k concurrent sessions. Assuming the server needs ~ 2 cores and 4GB ram, you'll need 2000 cores and 4000GB/4TB RAM. We're talking "old games" here, so I think it's reasonable to assume that we're not running autoscaling containers, and frankly it's probably a bit of a stretch to assume that there's anything other than a fixed set of servers if we're talking games from the 2005-2012 era. Hiring a 32 core/128GB Server is ~$1000/month from OVH, so to keep the peak capacity for the game available, you're talking ~$60k/month, plus various online services (login, auth, party, matchmaking, etc), licenses for things like SQL server, windows (yes, windows is commonly used in game development even up until recently). That's assuming no maintenance, or development costs happen. You have to budget for handling things like log4j, keeping CI/CD pipelines up to date to keep SSL certs valid and rotated, handling player support for those games, etc. That's not nothing, and while it might be manageable for EA/Ubisoft for your game, what about the other 10 games they have with 10k players each?
charcircuit 4y ago
The price of servers isn't the only cost. There is also cost to moderating the community and upkeeping tools related to that, paying people to keep the servers running reliably, dealing with privacy requests, dealing with changing laws.

dontlaugh 4y ago

That’s not even remotely true for the vast majority of games. Just look up the cost of game servers for Rust or Ark and you’ll see it tends to be over $1 per slot. With many slots unused, the per month per player cost is only sustainable with recurring revenue like subscriptions/similar or players directly paying for game servers.

loa_in_ 4y ago
That's retail price, no company is paying those
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  It's not far off in terms of scale. How many hours of enough extra idle slots can a one-off game purchase pay for? For most games, it's less than average playtime. Running a process to simulate an entire game world is very expensive, far more than storing a bit of data and responding to the occasional HTTP request.
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    Most game servers don't process anything when players aren't on the server, and players aren't playing all day. There are peak hours.
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      That hardly matters, you pay for the hardware necessary to be able to accept a new connection to a slot, with the world already loaded in memory.
      - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
        No, it really matters. We sold servers based on calculated loads. You make your money doing that basic math in that line of work.
        dontlaugh 4y ago
        You can optimise your costs around peak load, sure. You aren’t getting away from needing to run many game servers ready for a connection. The most cost effective way to do that is bare metal for base load, which means you can’t scale down to zero. Worse still, in a game where players choose their server, most servers will have many empty slots.

pixl97 4y ago

Public game servers are always going to be a target for hackers. Eventually libraries need updated and patched or logic exploits are discovered in the game. There is no such thing as perpetual in the computer security industry. Of course the self hosted versus company hosted equation is much different here. If the game publisher eventually just offered the server software for self hosting and freed themselves from the management burden it in theory would be much cheaper. But likely they've boxed themselves in with license deals that make this difficult.

maccard 4y ago

And I can guarantee you that this is not true. I've worked on multiple live service games in my career, and running servers for players efficiently and at scale is hard, and expensive.

corndoge 4y ago
Oh no! Who to believe!
effingwewt 4y ago
No,they are not. Especially since op mentioned most popular games having ~10k concurrent users. The added costs are studios running MMOs, and those aren't insane either. People hosted their own servers since the beginning of the net. The odd runaway hit MMO shells out more but also makes a ton more. Even then we see companies cheap out and make us sit through server queues. Live services these days amount to little more than checking license to play, loot-boxes, battlepass, etc. And yet because of those evil cash-grabs I can only play the game a few years even for single player games. Live services have become a worse dlc, as we knew it would in tge beginning.
- maccard 4y ago
  You're arguing a strawman here, and responding with emotion to the question of "are dedicated servers for old games expensive to keep running?". I'm going to skip the rant about single player games and queues. > No,they are not. Especially since op mentioned most popular games having ~10k concurrent users. > The added costs are studios running MMOs, and those aren't insane either. People hosted their own servers since the beginning of the net. Do you know how much it costs to run an online game? Assuming we're not talking about MMOs (because you're the one who said the added costs are studios for MMOs), a game with 10k peak concurrent users, and 10 players per session will need 1k concurrent sessions. Assuming the server needs ~ 2 cores and 4GB ram, you'll need 2000 cores and 4000GB/4TB RAM. We're talking "old games" here, so I think it's reasonable to assume that we're not running autoscaling containers, and frankly it's probably a bit of a stretch to assume that there's anything other than a fixed set of servers if we're talking games from the 2005-2012 era. Hiring a 32 core/128GB Server is ~$1000/month from OVH, so to keep the peak capacity for the game available, you're talking ~$60k/month, plus various online services (login, auth, party, matchmaking, etc), licenses for things like SQL server, windows (yes, windows is commonly used in game development even up until recently). That's assuming no maintenance, or development costs happen. You have to budget for handling things like log4j, keeping CI/CD pipelines up to date to keep SSL certs valid and rotated, handling player support for those games, etc. That's not nothing, and while it might be manageable for EA/Ubisoft for your game, what about the other 10 games they have with 10k players each?

charcircuit 4y ago

The price of servers isn't the only cost. There is also cost to moderating the community and upkeeping tools related to that, paying people to keep the servers running reliably, dealing with privacy requests, dealing with changing laws.