Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'

sunbytes , 4 months ago

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.

Specal , 4 months ago

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

ILikeBoobies , 4 months ago

The people online don’t need it though, they just need a place where they can enter an IP

lorty , 4 months ago

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.

feminalpanda , 4 months ago

Self hosted servers can go up to 32 officially.

Duke_Nukem_1990 , 4 months ago

Just the dedicated ones tho, right?

feminalpanda , 4 months ago

Yeah, the multiplayer mode of your single player world is 4 or 6, I forget which one.

Coreidan , 4 months ago

This is 100% about DRM

wolfshadowheart , 4 months ago

Pirates play on Palworld servers no problem. No problem at all.

KairuByte , 4 months ago

This is 100% not about DRM. Cracked clients work just fine, even on official multiplayer servers.

Coreidan , 4 months ago

We’ll see how long that lasts

KairuByte , 4 months ago

They really don’t have a reason to crack down on piracy. The conveniences of official are going to outweigh the inconveniences of piracy quickly if they keep pumping out updates regularly.

rab , 4 months ago

Hey my boss tells me the same and I barely make six figures wtf

doubletwist , 4 months ago

$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.

YeetPics , 4 months ago

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.

alessandro OP , 4 months ago

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)

YeetPics , 4 months ago

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).

redeven , 4 months ago

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.

KairuByte , 4 months ago

Game pass is routinely $1 for three months. You just keep cancelling and waiting a month before you can get the $1 deal again. Or just alternate between two accounts every three months, and you’re paying a grand total of $4/year.

mnemonicmonkeys , 4 months ago

Valve reduces their cut to 20% after the first $50M in sales

GhostMatter , 4 months ago

The article mentions all that, but it seems that no one has read it.

BeigeAgenda , 4 months ago

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.

conorab , 4 months ago

They said the quiet part out loud! Get ‘em!

SuperSaiyanSwag , 4 months ago

It’s on Gamepass for Xbox, unless those numbers are non-gamepass copies.

chiliedogg , 4 months ago

How much do gamepass copies pay?

YeetPics , 4 months ago

I have no idea what the over-under is between the creators and MS. my estimate isn’t exact, it’s close but relies on increased sales moving forward.

I also haven’t figured in production costs or debts.

KairuByte , 4 months ago

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.

YeetPics , 4 months ago

I was just making a loose estimate, there’s a lot I haven’t figured in but I’ll bet you with the sales in the next month they’ll surpass my numbers.

TexMexBazooka , 4 months ago

I bet they’re either already on or will migrate to AWS

Hotzilla , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

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.

brygphilomena , 4 months ago

I don’t particularly like the either or approach. You can certainly spin up some minimum on local hardware. You have some up front capex but something that doesn’t have a fluctuating, expensive monthly opex bill.

You can then use cloud architecture to add capacity resources on demand and in different geographic locations. You can also utilize multiple cloud architectures to further add redundancy and cost optimization.

If you build out the scripts used to dynamically scale to also pull current pricing, you can have something that is both heavily redundant and somewhat cost effective. Sure it’s not like azure, AWS, Google cloud, or any other public cloud option changes their pricing that frequently, but it would give a good way to compare specifically in different regions.

For a game like this, building capacity and the ability to scale early was clearly more important than optimizations in the server code base. 500k/mo isn’t actually a lot to companies and it’s likely to go down as optimizations are implemented and popularity stabilizes.

Hotzilla , 4 months ago

Main problem with game like this, is that you are probably not going to have it running more than 6 months with heavy loads, after that you can scale everything down.

If you have a business that is going to run 10-20 years, you can build complex solutions to optimize the cost.

In this kind of rocket like need of global computing power, the cloud is only real solution.

brygphilomena , 4 months ago

Oh yea. Though I don’t feel that utilizing different public cloud options should incur significant additional development time, at least not if it was something they considered during the development of the game.

It can also go the opposite way, moving from cloud to on premise as things stabilize and they want the more stable, consistent costs decreasing opex and spending more capex and have done optimizations to better determine the hardware they need so they don’t over buy.

It’s entirely possible they have some private servers from the development of the game that they used cloud to augment.

No matter how it was architected, right now it’s primarily in a public cloud of some sort.

50gp , 4 months ago

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

BeardedGingerWonder , 4 months ago

Or they’re super inefficient.

LazerVHSion , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Running a passworded Palworld server on Linux. Have about 7-10 active players on it and the server instance balloons up to ~33GB of RAM usage in less than 12 hours of uptime.

Supposedly disabling some features (like base raids) reduces resource utilization, but was curious what stock settings would do.

When it was restricted to 10GB on a container it would just crash every couple of hours, running out of resources.

uis , 4 months ago

Whoa Nelly!

feminalpanda , 4 months ago

The issue that we found is the game doesn’t let go of the players when the log off and also memory leaks. I have the server reboot after taking a backup each day.

LazerVHSion , 4 months ago

That makes things even more bizarre considering pal AI just ceases to function if you log out at a base and leave pals out.

But early access is early access I guess 😂

MangoPenguin , 4 months ago

It is, RAM usage is absolutely wild on it and it needs constant reboots.

Rikj000 , 4 months ago

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

BananaTrifleViolin , 4 months ago

500k a month to support 19 million person play base doesn’t seem totally unreasonable. They’ve already made £400m+ in a month 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.

lemmyng , 4 months ago

They can go the Minecraft route and allow players to self host servers, plus a subscription option for online servers.

feminalpanda , 4 months ago

They do, they need to work on the code but it works.

echo64 , 4 months ago

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.

Zagorath , 4 months ago

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.

Galaxy , 4 months ago

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.

Zagorath , 4 months ago

That’s good to know, thanks!

conciselyverbose , 4 months ago

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.

Pika , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

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. et instant access and start playing; get involved with this game as it develops.Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development.

conciselyverbose , 4 months ago

If you don't intend to continue to develop it, calling it early access is extremely gross and fraudulent.

There is no possible scenario where a studio small enough to justify using the early access tag can ever be forgiven for splitting their attention and taking money for multiple projects.

It is not possible to have multiple active early access projects in anything that even vaguely resembles good faith.

Pika , 4 months ago

That’s the entire point of the Early Access tag though, it’s a tag that states “hey this is still in its early development stages and is not a final product” it even states that the game might not be finished. I can understand why some might see the term Early Access and think that it means that it’s a game that is going to be finished eventually, but under the description of the tag it’s not an obligation and it would be stupid as a game developer to throw money towards something that you know isn’t going to take off or that you’ve lost passion for.

I would say they should change the name of the tag to be something that better clarifies it, but honestly I can’t think of a better term because it’s right it’s early access the only alternative I can think of is maybe early development to remove people thinking that it’s just paying to get access to the game early.

As a counter argument to the good faith argument, I personally don’t think it’s within good faith to buy an early access game with the expectation that it’s going to be finished, I’m not sure how much clearer Steam and the development team can make it regarding that the future of the game is uncertain. I for one avoid Early Access games until I can see the reviews and see whether or not it’s worth getting (or if I am super interested) and if I see the game reviews stating the game is Dead Or there’s nothing on the devlog I skip it and go to the next game.

Don’t take me wrong I’m not saying that developers should keep their game permanently in early access, however I don’t see a problem with the Early Access tag being used to illustrate at the game is still in early development, and if the tag itself didn’t say the game may or may not be finished I would even Advocate that if in Early Access game gets canceled they should give refunds.

conciselyverbose , 4 months ago

The tag means that you will continue to develop it. The second you decide you are not developing it, the early access tag is a lie.

That said, the idea that it's OK to abandon a game you sold people to make another one is also disgusting and also makes you a piece of shit of a person. The disclaimer is not a free pass to be a trashbag. It does not excuse or justify throwing away customers. It is merely an acknowledgment that you might fail.

Frankly, not only should you be required to remove a game from early access before you're permitted to launch another, but that release should be validated by Valve, and sent back with a "nope, this isn't a product" to get to release. Until it's actually a full featured game, you shouldn't be allowed to do anything else. If your studio fails under those conditions, it deserves to fail. A studio "rescued" by shitting on customers to fleece new ones is a trash studio.

Pika , 4 months ago

I fully believe that when a game stops being developed the Early Access tag should be removed but that’s the extent of where I agree, anything past that is a problem strictly of the consumer who knowingly purchased a game that advertised itself as unfinished.

I would also agree that if you want to keep an early access tag at minimum you should be required to post developer updates using steams update log like many companies already do, and failure to do so will eventually result in your Early Access tag being replaced with an abandoned tag, that way it lets buyers know that the game is not a finished product and it’s no longer in active development.

As for the sleaziness of abandoning a project once people have paid for it, I would chalk that down as they knew the risk upon buying the game since it was labeled Early Access. I think that it would be nice if the return window opened for 2 weeks when a game was abandoned to allow people who were hoping the project would go somewhere the ability to refund but I also think that neither company nor steam should be under obligation to do so since the consumer knew the risk going into it, plus I also think it would be kind of sleazy for those who got hours of playtime on it to expect that you’d get your full money’s back, even if the project was discontinued

conciselyverbose , 4 months ago

Early access is unconditionally not permission to abandon a game.

It is "permission" for your studio to fail. Literally nothing short of actual closure, forever, makes abandoning a game you sold forgivable.

NoIWontPickaName , 4 months ago

Oh no, you have to drop the studio name that has no sales and spin up a new LLC.

It takes about ten minutes to do that

steakmeout , 4 months ago

500k a month? Nope.

Gradually_Adjusting , 4 months ago

If the game ever stops, people might realize they’re playing Palworld.

chemical_cutthroat , 4 months ago

*East India Pokemon Company