I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They're not going to be using cloud services, they're going to privately host because it's way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can't just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that's also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.

Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn't alter the bottom line.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I’ma press X to doubt here.

They're not going to be using cloud services

Job listing for back-end engineer at Arrowhead says:

Cloud Engineering: Utilize Azure services to build and optimize cloud-based backend components and make use of monitoring tools to track live performance.

Our tech stack

NET/C#, Docker, Kubernetes/AKS, Azure, SQL Server, CosmosDB, Redis, Grafana, Terraform

Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution.

CEO said during the early day playercount woes:

It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.

They can't just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that's also baby bucks

A good back-end engineer is at least 100k. And a just-keep-the-lights-on crew is probably 3-4 of them.

FWIW: I also work in IT, on an IoT system that you might also assume has a “nonexistent” server cost. (I assure you, the cost exists.) I also used to work in game dev.

That said: Yeah, protesting by playing the game is a severely misguided notion.

[–] snekerpimp 1 points 6 months ago

I completely understand where you are coming from. Not being knowledgeable about IT infrastructure and how to host game servers, I was making assumptions based on how publishers are shutting down games that have low play count. Assuming it was a nominal amount of money to house and maintain servers for a game that generates no revenue, multiple servers for 100s of thousands of players that generates zero revenue would be noticeable. But if it’s just pennies, then it really would just be a drop in the bucket.

Sony should hurt in the bottom line for this, and I don’t see them caring about reviews and refunds, they will just move on to the next fleecing method.