Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'
Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'
"Wait, maybe we'll go bankrupt from server fees?" joked the Pocketpair CEO.
well this is probably PR as there is no such system nor it can be made that can have 100% uptime. not talking about the fact that network engineers rarely work with servers :)
56Not 100% but 99.9%... IIRC Guild Wars 2 servers had like 1 actual outage in 11 years. They have pretty amazing structure.
36well this is probably PR as there is no such system nor it can be made that can have 100% uptime.
Five-nines is entirely possible with enough resources and competent outage-minded engineers.
13Agree, but five nines are not 100% ;) Anyway - this discussion reminds me of Technical Report 85.7 - Jim Gray, which might be of the interest to some of you.
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If you just threaten your employees enough they river go down /s
5This is a software development business, which is a positively bananas trade no matter what’s getting written. And the smaller the business, the more hats network guys wear. We work with everything from the server app down to the coffee machine fueling the devs. And 100% uptime isn’t the most crazy demand I’ve heard. I’m sure Chujo is busier than a one-armed paper hanger with jock itch.
At least he’s got money to throw at his hosting company. Scaling up would have been much slower in the old days.
2I'm not versed in videogame network infrastructures, but wouldn't be enough just having a load balancer and a couple of instances to ensure "100% uptime"? At least before all instances and the load balancer itself decide to join a suicidal pact, but more instances mean less chance of a critical event happening, no?
3
Math seems fine if 2 million people payed $30 usd.
50Pocketpair says it's sold about 12 million copies of Palworld on Steam. At $30 each, that puts Palworld's gross revenue at $360 million so far, and that's ignoring its Xbox sales (it's on Game Pass, too).
Looks like a little more than 2M.
26Yeah but even at $360m, $500k every month is operating costs for the server only, and doesnt include the business' other expenses. That's a big chunk of profit going to operating costs.
If the business had no other expenses then yeah, they could keep the servers up for 60 years. But more expenses lowers that and the look to get a subscription model or new game becomes more attractive to a company.
23Ive seen articles that also say they've paid $500k on monthly server fees (ie total not per month) a couple times, so it could also just be a game of telephone messing up the info
11If they were only up for 1/10 of that, they'd be doing better than some games I paid $60 for
10They can optimize over time to get that number down. I assume they’re being a little sloppy right now in just over provisioning to keep up with peak demand.
But, yes, not particularly sustainable long term on just an initial purchase.
7That's in the first month of release, when users are at their highest, the code is at its buggiest, and everyone is getting their first impression of the game.
Eventually they'll have to be more reasonable, but I can see this making sense for the first few months.
4
They need to make 17,000 sales every month perpetually to cover the costs, and then those sales will cause the server costs to rise as more people start playing.
It's a one time income to cover perpetual costs. They will probably either need to start raising prices, reduce server costs, or maybe start a subscription service eventually, or start doing micro transactions.
5paid* 30 USD
3Blargh English – thanks.
2
Why did you randomly choose that number? It sold more than that on its first day.
1I vaguely recalled hearing a number of 1-2 million - but in hindsight it was a number related to peak consecutive users.
2
Honestly, other than the questionable Pokemon-esque models, Pocketpair seem like they have really solid heads on their shoulders
28Like 90% of them are distinct enough. And besides there are no pals that are outright copies. Not Anubis, Cremis, Lovander or whatever other pals.
Imo it's like getting upset/weirded out by someone's fan art of heavily-Pokemon-inspired OC.
29Azurobe's hair is very likely a model rip, but aside from that every comparison I've seen is either "someone who doesn't know anything about Pokemon would think these are Pokemon" or "the fluffy fox pal is obviously a ripoff of the fluffy fox pokemon, because only one company is allowed to make a fluffy fox!"
There's also that one pal that isn't actually in the game who looks like a trace of Luxray, but I give Pocket Pair the benefit of the doubt and say that it was just practice. Plenty of artists get their start with tracing.
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No one going to point out users self-host their servers?
24There's a lot of official servers that support 32 players as well
8I think it's like rust where lots of people play official servers and I think more play community and modded servers. But there are a lot of people on those official servers. But I also think Rusts player based is more tech competent and it's a more mature game which lends itself to more people setting up their own servers.
1
I've been playing single player this whole time
16Same. If I could like level my dudeand take collections with me then sure. Otherwise, pass
2
I'm imagining that one Silicon Valley episode
11Thanks, the cloud?
I mean yeah, pretty much, that and good software / network engineers. But otherwise hosting a global game like Palworld and having the player base it does would've been absolutely impossible if they were self hosting servers or calling up individual hosting providers around the world to work with. Being able to manage your entire network as software and be able to deploy anywhere around the globe nearly instantly does have huge benefits, not the least of which is that anyone can do it, even a small Indy dev, and there's little no upfront infrastructure costs, the costs only really scale with your users, so if your game flops you don't pay much, and if it's massive you should have the revenue to pay your bills.
8Yikes. They're going to burn through those millions very quickly at that rate.
1