The problem with MMO's shutting down

[DaveSimmons]

That only works with all-volunteer labor and no licensing fees for IP or software tools.

The game must be made open-source, the game engine must be freeware, any other libraries for audio, video, etc. must not have any ongoing fees, and no royalties are owed to anyone who worked on the game.

Also, if there was any value in the IP, code or other assets, any creditors might object in court to the company giving away what should be their property to try to sell.

 

[XavierMace]

Googling around doesn't have a lot of info on the costs but two comments were:

"Maybe you need a more humble system to only serve 50k concurrent players and your tech is good enough to serve 10k people per box (that would be pretty elite). You end up with a one box shard and a game server that can expand to 5 shards, on demand.

So, if you use machines that normally go for $100 per month and get a bulk discount of even 50% , that would still be 5 x $50 servers or $250 per location with maybe 5 in the US and one in Europe at $1500 per month, for this example."


"500 concurrent users could probably be hosted (depending heavily on the nature of the gameplay of the game) at less than $1000 a month. I'm assuming a single one of your servers can run 50 users concurrently (optimized, and depending on the nature of the game, they could handle more), and so you'll need 10 servers running 24 horus a day, 30 days a month, at an Amazon.com-hosted price of $0.120 an hour"

LOL, not sure where they're planning on getting machines for $100/mo that would come remotely close to functioning as a game server in the first comment. Nor getting a 50% discount for having 5 of them. That kind of pricing tells me they're probably getting pricing from a web host, pretty much all of which have in their ToS their services are for web site hosting, not application hosting or file storage.

For the second, Amazon EC2 pricing $0.120/hr puts you between pricing for a 2 vCPU and 4vCPU box, assuming their engine runs on Linux. If it runs on Windows, then that's right at the 2 vCPU mark. You're not hosting 50 users on 2 vCPU's. Let's say 4 vCPU's minimum. Going with your quoted 10 servers, that's $1,600/mo for Windows. 8 vCPU? $3,100/mo.

And, again, that's just addressing the server portion. Are you still expecting the game to be maintained? Who's setting up these servers? Who's maintaining them? That's not touching licensing, tools, etc.

 

[Craig234]

No, I'm talking 'maintenance mode', just kept running, no new dev. Automated payment system, one person to deal with things.

 

[DaveSimmons]

No, I'm talking 'maintenance mode', just kept running, no new dev. Automated payment system, one person to deal with things.

That one person needs to be a system admin to deal with the servers. Also, that means the company needs to stay in business, which means filing taxes and corporate paperwork, handling payroll, etc.

So there cases where this is possibly practical:

- The company is still in business, and there are no expensive license fees, and they expect to make enough to pay for server costs plus a couple of full-time salaries including taxes and benefits.
- The company is shutting down without any debts, and there are no barriers to completely open-sourcing the code, assets, engine, etc., and there are volunteers willing to run it as a hobby.