how much does it cost to run a online game server (ie: everquest, warcraft)

[draggoon01]

just wondering how much those severs cost and where the money goes. in anyone in the know could give a good guess. i figure there's initial cost of setup, and then mostly money goes towards high speed internet connections. possibly more money going towards hardware upgrade if game gets popular. but something like blizzard servers cost very little since they're just matching people, maybe anandtech forum servers cost more.

this is what got me wonderin, (as well as xbox live coming out in 2 weeks):

link

Sony's EverQuest brings Sony US$5 million dollars a month, a great deal of that falling directly to the bottom line.

 

[0roo0roo]

i wonder too since its a constant drain on their profits. apparently no companies like advertising on bnet, kkinda odd considering how popular it is. servers track stats and match players up based on them now too. diablo tracks all your items and stuff, thats gotta take resources.

 

[glen]

An EverQuest "Server" is actually multiple machines.
I believe they have thousands of machines and a fairly large staff running them.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Diablo probably uses around 100x the server power that war3 uses because the game itself is run on the servers, plus the charactor info with is backed up, etc. War3 only matches you or shows you games/lets you chat.

 

[LH]

Its not thousands..

Ultima Online uses 9 servers per shard(or did).
Everquest and Asheron's Call are in the 20-30 servers per "server" or so I heard.

The biggest cost are the OC3 lines. Followed by developers and server techs.

 

[glen]

Originally posted by: LH
Its not thousands..

Ultima Online uses 9 servers per shard(or did).
Everquest and Asheron's Call are in the 20-30 servers per "server" or so I heard.

The biggest cost are the OC3 lines. Followed by developers and server techs.

There are about 50 named EQ "servers."
Antonious Bayle, Bertoxxulous, Brell, Bristlebane, ... and so on to... Xegony, Xev, Zebuxoruk.

These so called "servers" are actually a networked system of 40 plus servers now with the original game and the 4 expansions.
50 x 40 = 2,000

 

[GoodRevrnd]

The biggest cost is bandwidth.

 

[draggoon01]

anyone have any numbers that seem reasonable? cost of servers? cost of bandwidth?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: draggoon01
anyone have any numbers that seem reasonable? cost of servers? cost of bandwidth?

Hard to compare EverQuest to anything smaller since they're running so much they have real economies of scale. Instead of having a set of servers in someone else's data server they have the volume to run their own data center. The net income is also much greater for them than for a smaller operation since some costs like client software programming are fixed.

Are you trying to figure out what EQ "should" be charging? (It's a business, so whatever the market will bear.)

Are you dreaming of setting up your own online game? The economics will be totally different with 1-2 servers. Rackspace.com and other dedicated / colocation services might have some useful rate info.

 

[draggoon01]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: draggoon01
anyone have any numbers that seem reasonable? cost of servers? cost of bandwidth?

Hard to compare EverQuest to anything smaller since they're running so much they have real economies of scale. Instead of having a set of servers in someone else's data server they have the volume to run their own data center. The net income is also much greater for them than for a smaller operation since some costs like client software programming are fixed.

Are you trying to figure out what EQ "should" be charging? (It's a business, so whatever the market will bear.)

Are you dreaming of setting up your own online game? The economics will be totally different with 1-2 servers. Rackspace.com and other dedicated / colocation services might have some useful rate info.

no, curiosity mostly. always find real costs interesting (meaning who gets what), like TIME article i read once about who gets what on a $15.99 music cd sale (a while ago)(artists got less than $1.00, but their compensation is debatable). so i'm just wondering how much it costs for everquest servers as opposed to blizzard or xbox-live or anything else on big scale. there's that one korean game that has millions subscribers or something crazy like that

 

[DaveSimmons]

no, curiosity mostly. always find real costs interesting (meaning who gets what), like TIME article i read once about who gets what on a $15.99 music cd sale (a while ago)(artists got less than $1.00, but their compensation is debatable). so i'm just wondering how much it costs for everquest servers as opposed to blizzard or xbox-live or anything else on big scale. there's that one korean game that has millions subscribers or something crazy like that

That would be interesting to read, but you'd have to set up the model carefully to divide up the fixed costs like development over the life of the game.

Online games are probably most similar to the cost of a CD from a major star. A huge upfront cost (software development vs. star's multi-million advance), huge marketing cost, high risk and high break-even sales point, huge profits if the CD is a major hit. The server / techs / bandwidth cost maps to the per-CD charge for manufacturing and distribution since it scales with the number of players / CD buyers.

Not that this analogy gets you any closer to real numbers.