I am going to have to agree with Corpius on this in that there will still be server ques at launch. They can stress test the servers all they want during the beta but they won’t have an accurate head count until the game launches. Some players will wait a couple of days, see a review, buy a copy the hour of launch, then try to log in. Blizzard can’t account for those individuals ahead of time.
They are a business and only want to spend as much money as necessary on hardware requirements to have a semi smooth experience for players. This is how all businesses operate. Smart game studios don’t overbuy on hardware they won’t need. That said, they probably do have a few servers sitting in boxes waiting to help adjust que times during the first week of D4. Either they end up using them, reallocate them to another game, or return them for a refund. More often then not, they end up using them due to the unexpected spike.
Oh for sure, certainly on launch days like tomorrow and the full retail launches, they’re in a hypercare room with the hosts (google) and greenlighting additional resources as needed while monitoring performance to figure out what the optimal set up is to support all concurrent users. It’s going to be rough tomorrow and probably fine by tomorrow night / saturday morning.
IF it was their own they’re already paying for the uptime… it wouldn’t matter about hardware, power consumption… or cooling let alone “real estate” because everything would either be owned or leased for years/decades dependent on contract.
If they’re using google cloud then it comes down to what servers they already have, have but aren’t using, or increasing for the release of the game. Because well know player numbers won’t dwindle after two weeks either… that’s just naive thinking.
Financially speaking server costs are nothing compared to the amount Blizzard will be spending for marketing their game. Even development costs are typically 1/10th of how much it costs to market a product to the scale Blizzard has and will be doing once we get closer to release. They have servers for several games… WoW/Classic… I don’t want to imagine just how many servers they have just for that one game alone. They can handle shifting loads for their games, and it’s not such a financial burden like you imagine it to be since they’re not paying the same costs as individuals would for vps.
Clearly you dont understand or grasp the concepts and talking to you is like talking to a wall.
You think they just use stuff they already have, or have leased? Lol. “Yeah bill configs and protocols dont matter, just throw d4 on the ow2 stack” like they dont need to add more, configure more, and it doesnt take up REAL space?
Im the naive one? Lol you’ve won. Im not going to even try with you anymore. Lost cause.
The thing is they have the resources to do whatever they want. That’s what you fail to grasp. They’re a business, but they have decades worth of experience to scale their services to meet their needs. You can be as technical as you want to, but I’m pointing out they can manage their resources perfectly fine. You make some big noise that it has a financial impact, but in reality it doesn’t because they tend to have enterprise costs when dealing with google, and other services for their needs…
You’re making this big fuss over literally nothing. They can scale to whatever capacity they desire, because simply put it’s about retaining customers… losing them is how you lose money. It’s in their best interest to scale accordingly.
Just because Blizzard already addressed not investing more resources into accommodating all the players who want to play, doesn’t mean I won’t complain when it happens. It doesn’t let them off the hook. Maybe you’re OK with being a cuck but not everyone is. Happy queue rage!
I’m going to have to agree with Corpius here. The connectivity is completely different. When you communicate with a web app, you only send a request to the server and the server responds. In a game app the connection in continuous (why a lot of games kick you for inactivity) you can be doing nothing and you are constantly sending and receiving large loads of data. It might appear some web apps do the same like an a notification or something, but that’s just the web app you are currently in sending a tiny ping asking if there have been any changes that need to be displayed… So yea VERY different technologies.
? Not even knee highs?!