this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Sudden success has killed lots of businesses.
Not more than sudden failure though. :)
They sold at least 5.92m copies, which amounts to roughly usd177m revenue(roughly usd124.32m after steam cut), and with the playerbase tanked from 2.1m peak to 682k peak in just 14 days, they can survive for a veeery long time with that kind of money.
Oh, my sweet summer child. That money is already spent.
And in this exhibit we see an example of "uncreative condescension". Note the certainty of tone, the diminutive treatment of others, and the unoriginal text selection. Truly a great specimen for our museum of narcissistic comments. Please, don't tap on the glass or it may try to condescend to you too.
I guess we can call your reply creative condescension?
Am I fighting fire with fire? Have I become the very thing I hate?
100%. Actually true.
I am guilty. And somewhat ashamed.
Spent on what? Please do tell
Probably AWS stuff. An application that hasn't been designed to scale well can get very expensive very quickly.
Iirc the hosting cost so far is a few hundred thousand dollar. So far. But with the tanking of player base the price might get lower the coming month.
Yeah, the devs did say server costs were killing them, IIRC. Probably some of the reason for the relatively minor updates since launch has been putting out the fire of ballooning cloud expenses.
Usually that affects businesses that either provide an online service, so their costs spike massively, or are selling physical objects where demand so far outstrips supply that customers leave entirely for something else.
A single player / selfhksted multiplayer game like this is much less vulnerable to those aspects.
It was reported they were spending half a million USD a month on server costs. A lot of the servers are player-hosted but there are also official servers hosted by PocketPair. Half a million won't immediately crush them with their current sales numbers but it isn't great either.
Honestly no idea why they even have official servers.
That's a fair point.