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)
Valve reduces their cut to 20% after the first $50M in sales
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Because it’s much more interesting to learn the important content or what people think is contained in an article by heated discussions than reading it.
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.
How much do gamepass copies pay?
I have no idea what the over-under is between the creators and MS. my estimate isn’t exact, it’s close but relies on increased sales moving forward.
I also haven’t figured in production costs or debts.
If the game ever stops, people might realize they’re playing Palworld.
*East India Pokemon Company
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% about DRM
Pirates play on Palworld servers no problem. No problem at all.
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.
The people online don’t need it though, they just need a place where they can enter an IP
thats a fuckton of server space, i didnt think playing on random official servers with no admins or good anti cheats would be that popular
$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.
Hey my boss tells me the same and I barely make six figures wtf
Imo they should:
- Ask money for a subscription to go online on official servers (after they ironed out a good anti cheat)
- Keep the self hosted / dedicated servers as a free alternative
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.
I bet they’re either already on or will migrate to AWS
No one in their right mind would deploy own servers for this kind of load. It fluctuate way too much and in half a year you have unused servers that are junk. Initial purchase price would be millions, and setup would take months.
They are definately running in some cloud, and 500k/month is about what you would expect to host servers for a popular game like this in close to launch.
I don’t particularly like the either or approach. You can certainly spin up some minimum on local hardware. You have some up front capex but something that doesn’t have a fluctuating, expensive monthly opex bill.
You can then use cloud architecture to add capacity resources on demand and in different geographic locations. You can also utilize multiple cloud architectures to further add redundancy and cost optimization.
If you build out the scripts used to dynamically scale to also pull current pricing, you can have something that is both heavily redundant and somewhat cost effective. Sure it’s not like azure, AWS, Google cloud, or any other public cloud option changes their pricing that frequently, but it would give a good way to compare specifically in different regions.
For a game like this, building capacity and the ability to scale early was clearly more important than optimizations in the server code base. 500k/mo isn’t actually a lot to companies and it’s likely to go down as optimizations are implemented and popularity stabilizes.
Main problem with game like this, is that you are probably not going to have it running more than 6 months with heavy loads, after that you can scale everything down.
If you have a business that is going to run 10-20 years, you can build complex solutions to optimize the cost.
In this kind of rocket like need of global computing power, the cloud is only real solution.
Oh yea. Though I don’t feel that utilizing different public cloud options should incur significant additional development time, at least not if it was something they considered during the development of the game.
It can also go the opposite way, moving from cloud to on premise as things stabilize and they want the more stable, consistent costs decreasing opex and spending more capex and have done optimizations to better determine the hardware they need so they don’t over buy.
It’s entirely possible they have some private servers from the development of the game that they used cloud to augment.
No matter how it was architected, right now it’s primarily in a public cloud of some sort.
500k a month? Nope.
