Game operation costs: the unpredictable beast?
Head of Improbable's Multiplayer Operations team Manuel Karg on forecasting hosting costs
Before he founded zeuz and dedicated himself to multiplayer hosting and operations, Improbable's Manuel Karg spent many years working in mergers and acquisitions.
Therefore, he's not only well versed in the technical challenges of multiplayer development, he's also an expert when it comes to portfolio management, modelling and mitigating risk, and balancing single and portfolio risks.
In this video, Karg digs deep into which risks matter most, which can be minimised, and which can be mitigated in order to prepare your game for any level of success.
Summary
Multiplayer game development is an expensive, time-consuming business. Successful titles can take years and millions of dollars to make, and commercial success is far from certain.
Yet even with the stakes as high as they are, it's easy to get so involved with day-to-day challenges that you forget that the seemingly small decisions you make at the start of development are going to impact a game's hosting costs and per user profitability.
That's why rigorous cost forecasting is so essential. And it's also why it's so notoriously difficult. From game type and game design to game mode, even small creative decisions are likely to have profound implications for the game's entire life-cycle. The same is true of your technical decisions, because the client/server architecture and the choice of game engine and server operating system are going to have similarly long-term consequences.
As in any industry, there's no risk-free formula for success. Risk is something to be managed and -- when possible -- exploited. And that's where Manuel Karg's experience and insight comes in: you may not be able to predict the future, but you can prepare for it.
With the right ongoing modelling, sophisticated forecasting techniques and a well-tailored hosting solution that combines the cost-efficiency of bare metal and cloud servers, you can minimise your costs by as much as 75% whilst still being ready to meet any level of success.
Discover more about our managed game server hosting services.