Anothersock wrote on Apr 20
th, 2022 at 8:09pm:
Servers do not cost millions - and I work in the industry of hosting and making games. Consider me the authority.
At the absolute most, if you are a real goddamn idiot, you end up paying 10k yearly. That's with maintenence.
What, shitty little flash games? See I work in this industry, too; and I know $10K won't even cover monthly colocation charges for the kind of hardware needed to virtualize DDO's servers. There's also software licensing fees, support contracts, maintenance costs, and bandwitdh to consider. DDO is not running on a single Dell R630; this is a mainframe-level machine backed by a SAN. The annual support contract for the device that holds the game's database is going to be $30k, minimum. Unless SSG retardedly built their own, in which case the pay check for the guy they have to keep on staff to fix it constantly is probably more like $70k.
Anothersock wrote on Apr 20
th, 2022 at 8:09pm:
The paperbox sales probably covered all server costs ever incurred ever.
So, in your head, the game was developed for free? Paper box sales went to pay back the cost of development, and the game was loosing money its first few years. The margins on selling physical copies are crap, that's why they stopped. The game that's $60 on store shelves earns SSG(Turbine at the time) about $1-5 a sale. And they did not sell "millions" of copies.
The real money-maker is the subscription model. MMOs are like gym memberships, tons of people buy them and then never use them. So they sell a physical copy of the game and earn enough for a McChiken; then a month later they get $15 of pure profit. THAT is what rakes in all the cash.
Anothersock wrote on Apr 20
th, 2022 at 8:09pm:
Particularly since they probably did the sane thing and bought servers to colocate or self host.
There's been quite a lot of spirited debate on this topic. Flav, our resident frenchmen and telco expert, believes the servers are colocated and thinks he's even identified the company that hosts them. Various comments from SSG on the other hand seem to indicate the servers are located at an in-house data center right at SSG headquarters. Its anyone's guess, really.
Anothersock wrote on Apr 20
th, 2022 at 8:09pm:
The fact you are willing to spend $5 to TR makes you nuts.
Of course I'm nuts. I paly DDO. I'm willing to spend that but unable to because they don't sell hearts at that price.
Anothersock wrote on Apr 20
th, 2022 at 8:09pm:
People paying $15 or more are just fucking dumb.
Yes. My entire point was "$5 might be reasonable, $15 is fucking ludicrous".