this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 95 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Fast, cheap, reliable. You can have any two you want.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

this is a server basterdization of "Good, Fast, Cheap" regarding producing just about anything I'm guessing, which tends to hold true in the real world quite well, yes?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

As an engineer yeah, but honestly it’s usually pick one to prioritize, one to strive for, and one to ignore.

We can get it out fast, and it can be not bad but pretty expensive or it can be pretty cheap but not good. If we get it good we can try to do it cheaply and take our time, or we can try to do it quickly and it’ll be expensive.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I just go for bad, slow, and expensive. This way everyone leaves me alone.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Found blizzard.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

so its stands true that what you make can be good, fast (as in be delivered quckly) and cheap and you can only have two like everything else, huh

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That works for some contexts, but no amount of time can get you both total reliability and low costs, so in this case it's pick one.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

In this context “fast” refers to speed of the system, not time to implement.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I'll take fast twice.

Double fast, yeah 😎

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

On spec, on time, on budget. Failure to meet those goals is a result of piss poor planning.

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Well 19m players x $29 is $551,000,000 banked so far.

They could pocket a few dozen million and still run the servers for around 85 years.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Don't forget the cutshare

29 = (8.7 to Valve) (20.3 Pocket)

7m are on Xbox, so the count is:

Pocket = 243.6 m (on 12m copies sold)

Valve = 104.4 m ( on 12m copies sold)

[–] mnemonicmonkeys 49 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Valve reduces their cut to 20% after the first $50M in sales

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The article mentions all that, but it seems that no one has read it.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Because it's much more interesting to learn the important content or what people think is contained in an article by heated discussions than reading it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

They said the quiet part out loud! Get ‘em!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I didn't even think to figure that in, was just doing some rough math figuring the numbers in are sure to change over the next week (methinks an upward trend for another couple weeks at least).

What even was Pokemon? This game stomps that entire franchise imo (been playing since red&blue).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Also missing Steams regional pricing, which would be very hard to guesstimate but for reference in the LATAM/MENA regions, it's like $13.

They still made a shitton of money mind you but yeah, a bit lower than estimated here.

EDIT: Also in some countries, the Xbox/MS price was like $1 so again, numbers could be lower.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You’re forgetting the fact that all stores take a fee, and many users are paying a pittance to play through game pass, which can cost as low as $1.

They still made quite a lot, but not $29 per user.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If the game ever stops, people might realize they're playing Palworld.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 9 months ago

*East India Pokemon Company

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (4 children)

The thing is, I don't need to be online.

I bet most people are playing single player.

Apart from the people doing multiplayer 10-20%?) everyone else could just be offline.

This is for them.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago

But it also proves that if a company gives a shit, they can do it. This can be achieved with lower costs and experience, so in time the costs will come down.

Whereas Activision blizzard don't give a fuck and anytime there's a new DlC or game there's significant downtime despite being a multi billion dollar company. Why people continue to support them I'll never know

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This is 100% not about DRM. Cracked clients work just fine, even on official multiplayer servers.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Pirates play on Palworld servers no problem. No problem at all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It's even weirder because I'd expect even those playing with friends to be doing so in their locally hosted servers with at most 4 friends I think? The people playing on the official servers are such a minority that I can't fathom this cost being worth it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago

$500k/mo isn't really even all that much in cloud costs. I did some work for a large company and just the PoC/development account for our project alone was $100k/mo.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (1 children)

thats a fuckton of server space, i didnt think playing on random official servers with no admins or good anti cheats would be that popular

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Or they're super inefficient.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Running a passworded Palworld server on Linux. Have about 7-10 active players on it and the server instance balloons up to ~33GB of RAM usage in less than 12 hours of uptime.

Supposedly disabling some features (like base raids) reduces resource utilization, but was curious what stock settings would do.

When it was restricted to 10GB on a container it would just crash every couple of hours, running out of resources.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The issue that we found is the game doesn't let go of the players when the log off and also memory leaks. I have the server reboot after taking a backup each day.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

That makes things even more bizarre considering pal AI just ceases to function if you log out at a base and leave pals out.

But early access is early access I guess 😂

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

It is, RAM usage is absolutely wild on it and it needs constant reboots.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Hey my boss tells me the same and I barely make six figures wtf

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Imo they should:

  • Ask money for a subscription to go online on official servers (after they ironed out a good anti cheat)
  • Keep the self hosted / dedicated servers as a free alternative
[–] [email protected] 52 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

500k a month to support 19 million person play base doesn't seem totally unreasonable. They've already made £400m+ in early access in the first month - so it's a drop on the ocean at the moment.

Costs will probably come down - at the moment they've been scrambling to keep up with demand which means expensive rapid deployment rather than long term server build out.

And presumably they plan to get the game out of early access so potentially get more players (although may not get many more players in this case as it's so popular) and more importantly start rolling out DLC content to make more money.

I doubt they need to go the subscription route plus may be too late as they launched without it.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago

Also, the player base will be a fraction of what it is today in a month. They're dealing with unprecedented demand that's gonna fall off into something more reasonable by throwing money at it.

It's the right thing for them to do. It would have been stupid to plan for this much demand. You'd delay the game by another year just building out a cloud native architecture. Letting the servers buckle would have killed momentum.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They can go the Minecraft route and allow players to self host servers, plus a subscription option for online servers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

They do, they need to work on the code but it works.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

presumably they plan to get the game out of early access

I've heard that the company has a history of…not doing that. They apparently have a few games out that went early access and left in an unfinished state.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (9 children)

From what I can tell their games that are in early access have not been left to languish in an unfinished state and are still getting updates

I am assuming the reason for that rumor that they just leave games unfinished has to do with people who bought their previous game Craftopia, which is very similar to Palworld but without the creatures.

In the last 6 months it seems to have been getting constant updates and fixes (about 2 a month)based on the steam changelogs, so I am not sure how that came to be seen as the game being left to die.

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