Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'
Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'
"Wait, maybe we'll go bankrupt from server fees?" joked the Pocketpair CEO.
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Math seems fine if 2 million people payed $30 usd.
Pocketpair says it's sold about 12 million copies of Palworld on Steam. At $30 each, that puts Palworld's gross revenue at $360 million so far, and that's ignoring its Xbox sales (it's on Game Pass, too).
Looks like a little more than 2M.
Yeah but even at $360m, $500k every month is operating costs for the server only, and doesnt include the business' other expenses. That's a big chunk of profit going to operating costs.
If the business had no other expenses then yeah, they could keep the servers up for 60 years. But more expenses lowers that and the look to get a subscription model or new game becomes more attractive to a company.
If they were only up for 1/10 of that, they'd be doing better than some games I paid $60 for
Ive seen articles that also say they've paid $500k on monthly server fees (ie total not per month) a couple times, so it could also just be a game of telephone messing up the info
They can optimize over time to get that number down. I assume they’re being a little sloppy right now in just over provisioning to keep up with peak demand.
But, yes, not particularly sustainable long term on just an initial purchase.
That's in the first month of release, when users are at their highest, the code is at its buggiest, and everyone is getting their first impression of the game.
Eventually they'll have to be more reasonable, but I can see this making sense for the first few months.
They need to make 17,000 sales every month perpetually to cover the costs, and then those sales will cause the server costs to rise as more people start playing.
It's a one time income to cover perpetual costs. They will probably either need to start raising prices, reduce server costs, or maybe start a subscription service eventually, or start doing micro transactions.
As the hype dies down the cost will go down a lot.
And I'm guessing their focusing on server improvements in software to further reduce the costs. $500k is a lot of money for this kind of thing, I still balk at the $50k or so my company pays and we're nowhere near the scale of Palworld.
12,000,000 sales so far on steam alone, so that covers the next 60 years or so
paid* 30 USD
Blargh English – thanks.
Why did you randomly choose that number? It sold more than that on its first day.
I vaguely recalled hearing a number of 1-2 million - but in hindsight it was a number related to peak consecutive users.