For amusements sake, how much is it likely to cost CR to run a PU and thus how much revenue would he need to generate to pay for the day to day running of the game ?
It depends on a number of factors.
They'll need a number of servers and the quality and expense of those servers will help determine the concurrent player limit. Those servers will need to be housed at a data centre, powered, maintained and bandwidth provided for....bandwidth again determining concurrent player limit. They'll need appropriate security, online moderation and so on. You can double those costs if you want redundancy and if CIG are serious they'll want similar setups in Europe and Asia and possibly Australia to minimise ping times and lag.
How optimised your netcode will be is another factor...if you can represent the position, actions and movement of a player with 1 packet of information instead of two you can double the players on your system.
What CIG will want is as many players per shard per server as possible to minimise costs.
It can be expensive....or fairly cheap. CIG say they plan on scaling to millions....but being blunt, millions of concurrent gamers means tens of millions of active subscribers.
CIG won't have any development costs to pay off...assuming their funding model...but there'll be no subscription fee either. There'll be microtransactions but also a continuing meed to support existing players and develop the game after launch.
As it is, I haven't heard anything about CIGs plans in this area. If they plan on one universal data centre for everyone, that could put players outside the US at a severe disadvantage due to lag for example. They want 400 players per instance....but according to some players, CIG appears to have some sort of miracle tech which layers multiple instances inside instances to get around existing instance limits but even if that were true (and CIGs own description works against it) data is data and a lot would depend on the quality of the netcode, hardware and associated bandwidth.
Given SCs stature, it'll be a target for DDOS attacks and hacks...we don't knowcwhat sort of security CIG are planning.
But overall, CIG don't appear to have given this much thought. They have systems that have or will scale to allow for millions of players...but nothing on whether they plan on having, for example, multiple data centres across the globe.
To put it another way...
World of Warcraft has servers to handle authentication, looting, the various continents they have, instance servers for their dungeons and raids, and so on.
Some of these...actually, a lot of them...are likely virtual these days. And these are spread across a number of data centres. You can check out some old info on their set up if you want....over 13000 blades across 10 data centres alongside a global NOC and a management of 68 staff.
Of course, servers would have been optimised since then.
To get CIGs "millions of players" however, thst's the scale you'd need.
If they are serious....they'll want three data centres to minimise lag times, a global NOC and an engineering team to manage and secure them (this is not the responsibility of the data centre) and they'll want enough servers of a high enough quality to handle an appropriate load and other tasks such as authentication and security.
And these type of servers are not cheap. Nor is running or maintaining them 24/7. And CIG likely won't have the same efficiencies of scale.
As it is...I think CIG haven't even set up the $25 Million stretch goal of European and Australian test servers. I don't think they"ve bothered with localisation so far for other languages :woop:
TLDR...depends on a number of factors but given CIGs stated goals, likely to be expensive
