500k a month to support 19 million person play base doesn’t seem totally unreasonable. They’ve already made £400m+ in early access in the first month - so it’s a drop on the ocean at the moment.
Costs will probably come down - at the moment they’ve been scrambling to keep up with demand which means expensive rapid deployment rather than long term server build out.
And presumably they plan to get the game out of early access so potentially get more players (although may not get many more players in this case as it’s so popular) and more importantly start rolling out DLC content to make more money.
I doubt they need to go the subscription route plus may be too late as they launched without it.
Also, the player base will be a fraction of what it is today in a month. They’re dealing with unprecedented demand that’s gonna fall off into something more reasonable by throwing money at it.
It’s the right thing for them to do. It would have been stupid to plan for this much demand. You’d delay the game by another year just building out a cloud native architecture. Letting the servers buckle would have killed momentum.
Imo they should:
500k a month to support 19 million person play base doesn’t seem totally unreasonable. They’ve already made £400m+ in early access in the first month - so it’s a drop on the ocean at the moment.
Costs will probably come down - at the moment they’ve been scrambling to keep up with demand which means expensive rapid deployment rather than long term server build out.
And presumably they plan to get the game out of early access so potentially get more players (although may not get many more players in this case as it’s so popular) and more importantly start rolling out DLC content to make more money.
I doubt they need to go the subscription route plus may be too late as they launched without it.
Also, the player base will be a fraction of what it is today in a month. They’re dealing with unprecedented demand that’s gonna fall off into something more reasonable by throwing money at it.
It’s the right thing for them to do. It would have been stupid to plan for this much demand. You’d delay the game by another year just building out a cloud native architecture. Letting the servers buckle would have killed momentum.
They can go the Minecraft route and allow players to self host servers, plus a subscription option for online servers.
They do, they need to work on the code but it works.