4 ms·

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.