Fast, cheap, reliable. You can have any two you want.
this is a server basterdization of “Good, Fast, Cheap” regarding producing just about anything I’m guessing, which tends to hold true in the real world quite well, yes?
As an engineer yeah, but honestly it’s usually pick one to prioritize, one to strive for, and one to ignore.
We can get it out fast, and it can be not bad but pretty expensive or it can be pretty cheap but not good. If we get it good we can try to do it cheaply and take our time, or we can try to do it quickly and it’ll be expensive.
I just go for bad, slow, and expensive. This way everyone leaves me alone.
That works for some contexts, but no amount of time can get you both total reliability and low costs, so in this case it’s pick one.
On spec, on time, on budget. Failure to meet those goals is a result of piss poor planning.
Well 19m players x $29 is $551,000,000 banked so far.
They could pocket a few dozen million and still run the servers for around 85 years.
Don’t forget the cutshare
29 = (8.7 to Valve) (20.3 Pocket)
7m are on Xbox, so the count is:
Pocket = 243.6 m (on 12m copies sold)
Valve = 104.4 m ( on 12m copies sold)
I didn’t even think to figure that in, was just doing some rough math figuring the numbers in are sure to change over the next week (methinks an upward trend for another couple weeks at least).
What even was Pokemon? This game stomps that entire franchise imo (been playing since red&blue).
Also missing Steams regional pricing, which would be very hard to guesstimate but for reference in the LATAM/MENA regions, it’s like $13.
They still made a shitton of money mind you but yeah, a bit lower than estimated here.
EDIT: Also in some countries, the Xbox/MS price was like $1 so again, numbers could be lower.
You’re forgetting the fact that all stores take a fee, and many users are paying a pittance to play through game pass, which can cost as low as $1.
They still made quite a lot, but not $29 per user.
If the game ever stops, people might realize they’re playing Palworld.
The thing is, I don’t need to be online.
I bet most people are playing single player.
Apart from the people doing multiplayer 10-20%?) everyone else could just be offline.
This is for them.
But it also proves that if a company gives a shit, they can do it. This can be achieved with lower costs and experience, so in time the costs will come down.
Whereas Activision blizzard don’t give a fuck and anytime there’s a new DlC or game there’s significant downtime despite being a multi billion dollar company. Why people continue to support them I’ll never know
This is 100% not about DRM. Cracked clients work just fine, even on official multiplayer servers.
It’s even weirder because I’d expect even those playing with friends to be doing so in their locally hosted servers with at most 4 friends I think? The people playing on the official servers are such a minority that I can’t fathom this cost being worth it.
$500k/mo isn’t really even all that much in cloud costs. I did some work for a large company and just the PoC/development account for our project alone was $100k/mo.
