Fast, cheap, reliable. You can have any two you want.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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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.
Found blizzard.
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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.
In this context “fast” refers to speed of the system, not time to implement.
On spec, on time, on budget. Failure to meet those goals is a result of piss poor planning.
Those are all the same attributes, just the planned out version of it where the balance of speed, reliability and cost are decided upon ahead of time.
I'll take fast twice.
Double fast, yeah 😎
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.
They said the quiet part out loud! Get ‘em!
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.
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It’s on Gamepass for Xbox, unless those numbers are non-gamepass copies.
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.
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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% about DRM
This is 100% not about DRM. Cracked clients work just fine, even on official multiplayer servers.
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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.
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$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.
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
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.
They do, they need to work on the code but it works.
presumably they plan to get the game out of early access
I've heard that the company has a history of…not doing that. They apparently have a few games out that went early access and left in an unfinished state.
From what I can tell their games that are in early access have not been left to languish in an unfinished state and are still getting updates
I am assuming the reason for that rumor that they just leave games unfinished has to do with people who bought their previous game Craftopia, which is very similar to Palworld but without the creatures.
In the last 6 months it seems to have been getting constant updates and fixes (about 2 a month)based on the steam changelogs, so I am not sure how that came to be seen as the game being left to die.
Because having 2 early access games at once and announcing a third is not the point of early access.
Steam should straight up ban developers from even creating any additional game pages while they have early access active.
This in my opinion is a horrible take. There are many games that companies just realize are not going to take off and therefore are not worth finishing, preventing a company from publishing a game because they have another game that they are not intending to finish that's still an early access is a horrible way to cut Innovation and prevent what could be very good games from publishing.
The very game you're commenting about is one of them, palworld was originally created as a jab to Pokemon that was its entire point of creation as more or less a joke it wasn't meant to be serious until a little bit into development. If they had been restricted down under what you're talking about they might not have even bothered launching it because nobody expected the game to take off the way it did.
Steam should not be punishing someone for using Early Access the way it was meant to be used, which is to demonstrate a game that is in early content state. As a consumer, you should not be buying Early Access games if you're worried about the game never being finished, Steam even States this under the description of Early Access. 
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Hey my boss tells me the same and I barely make six figures wtf
500k a month? Nope.
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.
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But then they'd be paying $2M a month! /s
Tbh they probably already are, $500k/month is a lot of money. They would be able to get those costs down by hiring a few it engineers and renting a few racks at a CoLo. Geographic distribution is hard for a company of their size, though, and maybe it's not worth making that investment if the game's popularity isn't going to last.
Yeah the up front cost of the type of infrastructure necessary to handle the player volume they have is not only expensive, but requires a ton of expertise to be done correctly, AND requires lots individual geographically discrete locations to keep latency down.
The fear for them would be investing in all that infrastructure just for the game to fall off in popularity after a few years.
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