Larian’s Swen Vincke posted a tweet yesterday showing the game hitting 500,000 concurrent players, making it the third most played game on all of Steam He said that he told IT to only expect 100,000 concurrents at max.
Odd headline. Seems very rooted in the assumption of online gaming these days to me but then you get in and the article is basically just saying the game is a huge success, which is great news I'm sure we can all agree. :)
The game does have multiplayer. If it's not using P2P connections, preparing for 100k players and having 700k could make that slower. But I'm pretty sure it's P2P so that doesn't make any difference.
There's still going to be some server overheads in connecting players together initially (I don't think it works just by IP), but yeah I think the game stuff itself is P2P.
If you're launching on Steam you're paying the 30% anyways.
If you publish elsewhere there's a lot you have to build yourself, but it would allow more freedom in the way you implement it. It might also be cheaper, but that depends on the way you do things.