Rumbleverse is yet another game that won't make its first anniversary, It looks like everyone is getting refunded, which is good, but I feel like an old man because I HATE this model for video games. It looks more and more like not only is the industry betting big on trying to make hits, but any game that doesn't hit isn't just getting sent to the bargain bin but is disappearing. Old games from the past that didn't hit super well can still be played and sometimes even get modern re-releases (like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, which is available on Xbox, PC, and Switch. Or Voodoo Vince, which got a full on remaster) and chances to shine again, or at least by remembered by their cult following. At the very least you can still break out a Gamecube to play @imunbeatable80's future #1 game of all time, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. Or emulate it.

Games like Rumbleverse, which a lot of people worked hard on and a lot of people liked, are just going to be gone. I doubt there will even be fan servers. It sucks. I don't understand why the big companies that put these games out don't at least keep the servers up for awhile. I mean how much could it cost to run servers for something like Babylon's Fall, which nobody played? I feel like the more servers come down the less people will want to invest in these live services games, especially the ones that charge up front. I know that's why I never bought the Outriders DLC and only played the main game because it was on Game Pass. I just went back to finish Far Cry Primal yesterday. That game's 7 years old and I bought it 2 Xboxes ago but the game AND save were just sitting there on some server waiting for me to go back to it.

This is also likely bad news for Iron Galaxy, a studio closely associated with Giant Bomb that does not seem able to catch a break with its original games, even though Rumbleverse was apparently good. They did an amazing job with Killer Instinct and it seems like Dive Kick was something of a cult success, but they've had a lot of misses. I hope they can stay in business and keep trying new things instead of just being a port house.

I never played Rumbleverse but this just sucks.

This reminds me I have no idea what 'doing good' looks like for a live service game. 'cos I thought Rumbleverse was making some waves.

Unless things dropped off massively last year.

@shindig: The thing is, I don't think Rumbleverse made a big impact outside of this corner of the internet. It never had that big of a player base. It is, what it is.

For me Rumbleverse was the game of 2022 I really wanted to like but never really clicked. I never really "got" how I was supposed to get better at the game or what were optimal strategies. The problems the game had with controllers did not help.

@shindig: I think it did well critically and got a small but dedicated fan base but it wasn't a breakout hit and these games need large communities to sustain themselves.

Basically there are three options:

1) Monster industry defining hit like Fortnite

2) Big hit but not world beating like Destiny or Apex Legends

3) Dead or dying.

I'm sure people can point to some games that buck this trend and some games' servers stick around despite their not being super popular for various reasons, but unless you're a tiny team with a low resource game it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room for cult hits because you can't sustain the playerbase, and so many of these games are massive timesinks with battle passes and the like.

It just seems that companies are more willing to cut bait these days than to keep something like Battleborn around for a few years.

@bigsocrates I think you're underselling how big of a success something like Apex Legends or Destiny is. I think there is still room for smaller multiplayer games, but they still require more engagement or a much larger commitment from their publisher than most games actually get. I think I've played more great multiplayer failures than successes at this point.

@bogard: I described them both as "big hits" which I think is fair.

Fortnite has pulled in like $5 billion a year, while Apex took a few years to hit $2 billion. That's still a very big hit but it didn't fundamentally change the industry.

I don't see a lot of games on a lower level being supported by big companies. There's some indie stuff out there with very small teams. I guess maybe Sea of Thieves, though it's really hard to know what the revenue is on that since it's part of Game Pass and Microsoft is opaque.

What games are you thinking of?

@bigsocrates:Stuff like Hunt Showdown, EFT, or every fighting game that has continuous support for a year (or more). Or stuff like Battlefield. Or even other smaller, still supported games like Paladins. I guess Destiny isn't really even at the same level of success as Apex. They're doing like a third of its yearly revenue. I just think there are still more degrees of success for online games is all.

I bet the League fighter doesn't put up League numbers, but it still gets more than a year of support.

I wonder how bad their numbers were. I think there's a good chance they were pulling in fewer than 1000 concurrent players daily. I guess that's not what Epic is looking for.

This is a huge bummer. Rumbleverse was one of the only Battle Royales that I could hold my own in, but also that I was never that upset about when I lost. It's also one of the only games that I've bothered saving clips from. I'm glad I'll have those memories, but the fact that it didn't even get a year to grow is just depressing.

@bogard: I don't really think of EFT or Hunt Showdown as Live Services games in the same way. As far as I know they're just multiplayer games with additive developments but they don't use seasons or other things like that to rotate content in and out. Tarkov I think has zero microtransactions and just relies on buys. They also have relatively small individual games so they are still playable even with servers being a little dry. It's a different and older model that doesn't require the same level of support as something like Fortnite that rotates stuff in and then out constantly because you're mostly just building out what already exists.

Paladins of course is more like the prime live services model but they claim to have had 50+million players. I honestly have no idea what their revenue is like. That may be a genuinely lower tier.

But two things all those games have in common is smaller teams and not belonging to a mega publisher (unless you count Deep Silver.) They may not count as indies but they're relatively close. I'm talking more about the big hyped megaprojects from the biggest companies. Those tend to burn bright or get shuttered quick.

@bigsocrates: I look at this news and think this is just 1 less game I have to review before I get to Billy Hatcher.. with the rate these games are dying ill be done with all reviews in no time.

Seriously, this is a bummer. I don't think anyone can disagree, these bets companies are making on this type of game is turning out to be a mistake. For every Apex or Destiny that comes around I feel like 10 other games fail and these failing games aren't cheap to make. I'm also saddened that in maybe 20 years, all of this generations games will just be abandonware that won't run for people looking to play the games we are playing now.

Having a disc for Battleborn, Anthem, Avengers, or even Babylons fall isn't going to do anyone any good once those games die officially, so unless someone runs fan servers those games will be lost forever. Some people might say "good.. those games sucked" but I still think those games should be playable to some extent down the line. That obviously head more towards game preservation.. but I agree with you, games need to be realistic as to how popular they are going to be. You can't expect every game is going to be fortnite.

It seems like it must be very difficult for a studio to make multiplayer games their bread and butter output.

You have to make solid game design and execution choices, then completely independent of that you also have to lasso a playerbase somehow and convince them they should keep playing the game, either because it’s getting constant updates and/or is some esport every little 12-year-old thinks they’re gonna go pro at.

It seems like a lot to manage unless you’re a juggernaut major studio. Even big studios can fumble, like I dunno, Overwatch 1 player numbers slipping over time, and Overwatch 2 not really rejuvenating things *that* much.

At least with single player games, you put ‘em out, hope you get good press and that you marketed the game well, and hope get a decent ROI at the end of the day, then move on to the next project. Maybe there’s more investment money/publisher interest in the forever-revenue of a live game, but making a multiplayer game popular enough to be on anyone’s radar and then maintaining interest enough to justify your studio costs being devoted to the game seems way harder. Kudos to IG for trying and Rumbleverse seemed cool, but I guess it didn’t work out.

I feel like IG never catches a break except maybe those couple seasons of Killer Instinct.

@bigsocrates: Just look at their player numbers on Steam. The disparity between something like a Paladins and an Apex is gargantuan. And only represents a fraction of one's player base. I suspect this is a combination of Epic being less willing to sink resources into struggling games in combination with really dire player numbers.

"50 million players" doesn't really translate to engagement. Technically I count in that number and I played like one round of Paladins 5 years ago. I don't think every online game needs to be Apex or Destiny (or Fortnite) to succeed, but they do need an engaged audience.

Id is still supporting Quake Champions five years later with only hundreds of daily players. If they ever make a new Quake and somehow expect it to pull Apex numbers they'd be delusional.

It feels like it's the mid-00s all over again and every studio wants to make their World of Warcraft, but better. Or the mid-10s where everybody wants to make their Hearthstone, but better.

My opinion is that if you missed the boat on a trend, you missed the boat. Don't bother showing up late because it never works. There will be other trends and maybe you'll be ready to jump on those instead. Or if you're really good, you'll create that trend.

Apex Legends only came out some 2 years after PUBG, and that was probably the last time it was worth it to release a Battle Royale. And even then Apex needed to be genuinely insanely good already at launch, which it was. And of course you have games like the above mentioned Tarkov, which can exist because it makes modest revenue on an extremely lean budget, something a major publisher could never do.

I appreciate that Rumbleverse at least had an angle, but it wasn't distinct enough. But it probably hurt it a lot that it looks too much like Fortnite visually.

@imunbeatable80: Don't you worry. There will always be an All Walls Must Fall type game for you to "enjoy" out there. Man I sometimes see the random dreck you play pop up in various sales and shake my head at how you even picked it. Billy Hatcher's going to be great though!

I think that you underestimate just how big the big hits can be. Fortnite on its own throws off about half as much revenue as Nintendo. It makes more than Nintendo did during the lean Wii U years (and remember that Nintendo also had the 3DS at that time so it still had a hit system out!) The big hits are just crazy profitable, so the big publishers are willing to take multiple swings in the hope that they get a game that throws off billions upon billions of dollars. You can afford to have a bunch of games crash and burn if you can get the one hit, and gaming has always been a hit driven business. Is there much difference to Ubisoft business wise between something like Beyond Good & Evil, which flopped commercially but is remembered fondly and is still digitally available for anyone who wants to play it 20 years later, and something like Hyper Scape, which crashed and burned and was forgotten? I don't know. I don't know if Beyond Good & Evil's tail actually matters to Ubisoft's bottom line even though as big fans of older games you and I are happy that it's still accessible.

There have always been more flops than hits, it's just that the old flops are still playable (mostly) and the new ones are not. Iron Galaxy's last high profile flop, Extinction, still pops up in sales from time to time but does it make them substantial amounts of money? I don't know. They may have lost just as much on that as they did on Rumbleverse.

As someone who, like you, enjoys playing older games even if they weren't the best games, and really digs playing older games that actually are good (Ni No Kuni is my current treadmill game and I think I like it much more than you did) I'm also sad that so many games are already unplayable and more will join them. I think it sucks that Destiny 2 has taken much of its content offline and totally destroyed its story even though it's still an active game in development. I hate all this stuff. It's the same as old movies or old music or old books. I remember reading about lost masterpieces like The Magnificent Ambersons when I was a kid. Video games are going to have so many versions of that. Interesting or important games just lost to time and not even really playable by emulation.

It sucks. But most people in power in the industry just don't care about preservation or anything like that. And if Beyond Good & Evil and Hyper Scape have the same downside but a hit multiplayer title has a much bigger upside than a single player hit they will chase those dollars. Heck Ubisoft might be chasing them all the way into bankruptcy!

@apewins: It also showcases to me atleast, how much unique and fresh ideas for a genre don't always equate to something the masses want. Critics say they want something fresh and new to shake up the formula but in reality we or they usually rush back to the tried and true after saying...he that was neat...then promise they will play it some more and the next time they jump on, they pop in their COD or fortnite lol. Bit of an exaggeration, but yeah it's hard to push your pals or people to play a battle royal fighter, that takes time to learn vs just something something shooter for the genre. I wish these games switched to just some cheap way to keep them going, maybe a monthly donation box for die hards, so games arent forced to end. Never know if your game just came out too early. Look at among us...which wasnt as popular at release as it is now.

It was a fantastic game at its core and had a ton of potential within the first month. Yet as someone who was mildly "killing" it with about 50 wins into the midseason update the game got heavily metafied and games became kind of the same thing with little to no big gameplay moments I experienced before that point.

It was very much a "play it safe" kind of game when you were getting into rooms where everyone knew what they were doing, and I honestly feel like thats where the game was going to live or die. That and with all the things they added it really didn't address a whole ton of the problems you would see in those rooms. I'll remember my time with it mostly fondly but the last week or so of playing before uninstalling it was very... yeesh, it no longer really resembled what I came to the game for.

@bigsocrates: yeah, I know I'm in the huge minority.. but I almost never get to these multi-player only games right when they launch, but some stay on my radar to try later, and rumbleverse was one of those games.

I'm almost always a year (or more) behind, and while that has saved me some cash.. then I just also miss out on games completely. I could go play rumbleverse now, just so I don't miss the experience, but that seems pointless now. If I play the game now and love it, I'll just be more upset it's going away.

In other news, would love to pick your brain on Ni No Kuni.. I totally believe most people will like it more than me, but would still love to hear your thoughts. This certainly isn't the thread for it.

curious if it was on steam would it still be going to close. It is an epic exclusive right?

@imunbeatable80: I feel like getting to these multiplayer games late never works out well, especially if they have a smaller population. Even something like Splatoon 3 that has a large supply of kids playing and presumably new people joining regularly I get absolutely wrecked. Maybe I just suck more than most but I can't think of many multiplayer games that I come to late and do well in. Then again the last multiplayer game where I held my own at all was probably Titanfall 1. I was kind of okay at Rocket League for a minute too I guess. But I think as @meestero points out this is a game that got a complex meta pretty soon after launch.

I don't know when I'll finish Ni No Kuni but I promise I'll either post in your thread about it, write my own review, or both. I'm only 5 hours in so far so my opinion could change wildly.

I just hope they take some of those ideas, and put it in a Hi-Fi Rush sort of scoped game. Instead of shooting for infinite money they could make something smaller and work a Game Pass deal with MS (assuming those deals are worthwhile).

Multiplayer games of any kind seem like such a risk as people stick to their Call of Duties or Leagues of Legends or Fortnites. Feels like it's harder and harder to peel people away from the big ones.

Rumbleverse was hands down my GOTY for 2022. It is the most fun I've had in a videogame in probably the last 10 years. I was eager to try and learn new tactics with each patch and balance change. And, with that, I always felt like I was getting better, not worse like with other multiplayer games. It's rare for shutdowns like this to really make waves in my gaming life, but this one hurts.

See everyone on the boat for one last cannon blast to the sky!

@csl316: A tons of MP games with relatively small communities stick around for ages, Rumbleverse was clearly not trying to be Fortnite.

Rumbleverse had connection issues at launch with 100k people in a queue, it seems people didn't care to stick around long term.

How do you even know Hi-Fi Rush is a success?

@thepanzini: There are a lot of multiplayer games with small communities where they leave the servers on and maybe put out a little DLC from time to time but not a lot of live service games intended to be in active development that last a long time like that. Of course they could have ceased development on Rumbleverse and just kept the servers up for a time (it was published by Epic so they have the cash) but maybe they felt like the game wouldn't work well without constant balance tweaks.

Hi-Fi RUSH has consistently been in the top 10 on Steam's revenue charts since its release and was a huge critical success. It's just outside the top 10 for games being played on Xbox Live despite not having been out for a full week on the 30th when the weekly list was compiled.

What kind of expectations do you think Microsoft had for this game? If "hugely popular on Xbox and selling very well on PC despite also being on PC Game Pass" is not a success for your $30 shadow dropped game then something has gone horribly wrong with your expectations.

@bigsocrates: How much has it made? How many new subs has it brought to game pass? We will never know.

Hi-Fi Rush is a first party passion project likely with very little financial expectations, MS might just be happy with critical acclaim.

Saying Iron Galaxy should make that instead of Rumbleverse doesn't make sense.

Hi-Fi Rush peak players on steam was 6k, its also not in the top 100 most played.

All we know is its doing well on game pass, but it's one and done short 10hr game, it could fall quickly over the coming weeks.

@thepanzini: Hours of play on Steam are irrelevant because its purpose on Steam is to make sales and generate revenue. A 50 hour game can generate more hours of play than a 10 hour game with 25% of the sales but if the 10 hour game generates more revenue adjusted for production costs it's a bigger hit.

And new Gamepass subs aren't how Microsoft judges Gamepass success anyway. For one thing sub retention is very important and for another it's impossible to be certain what game brought in how many subs. I mean Microsoft also put two Persona games and Monster Hunter Rise on Gamepass this month so teasing out what came from Hi Fi Rush and what came from those can't be done.

But if a game with literally zero marketing budget is a huge critical hit, captures a lot of word of mouth, and sells extremely well (top 10 on Steam is great for a zero marketing new IP that also launched on a subscription service) it's a success. Otherwise you're saying there's literally no way to tell if a game is successful, if sales, critical reception, and buzz aren't enough.

As for whether Iron Galaxy should have made something like Hi-Fi RUSH instead of Rumbleverse...that's a totally different argument. The answer there is that nobody can say what game they would have made or how well it would have done. Their last singleplayer original game was Extinction and that was pretty much an unmitigated failure both critically and commercially. Also it's perfectly possibly to make a great singleplayer mid budget game and have it flop. I personally really liked Lost in Random but that seems to have flopped. It's impossible to know ahead of time that you're going to make a good game let alone a game that happens to catch the zeitgeist enough to be a hit, so saying "you should have made Hi-Fi RUSH instead" is like saying "you should have made a successful game instead of a flop."

Well yeah. Pretty much every studio wants to make successful games. The trick is in the execution, and "mid budget singleplayer experiences" is not exactly a market section with a ton of huge hits recently.

This news blows because Rumbleverse was the best Battle Royale game I played and could actually win multiple times. Sadly, trying to break into a supersaturated market and exclusively with a publisher that already stumbled into THE Battle Royale game that's standing atop the market wasn't going to pan out. I'm just mad that this game flopped within half a year instead of getting a little more time before the plug was pulled. Maybe the producers look at other Live Service games and think it's a failure if it doesn't make billions of dollars in a month, that would explain a lot of recent decisions by Square Enix and Embracer.

@dochaus: I think Epic did a decent job with promotion. I saw a bunch of ads for it and I was offered free giveaways for items to try to induce me to play. It got good press. I don't think this is on the publisher. I also think we've seen games with established IPs or famous teams attached flop pretty hard in this space so I'm not sure what promotion strategy would have worked. The game was good, it got some buzz, but it's a crowded market.

I doubt Epic would have pulled the plug if it were profitable, even only mildly profitable. It definitely sounds like Iron Galaxy wanted to keep going so my guess is that it was losing money and Epic didn't really see a way to turn it around so decided it would be cheaper to offer refunds now than to keep it going another 6 months.

I mean they're refunding everyone's purchases. What company would do that with a profitable game that people liked? Why not just keep the money, leave the servers on, everyone's happy?

@bigsocrates: I pretty much agree but my post was response to the suggestion they should make a Hi-Fi Rush scoped game instead.

Obsidian said this last week,

“We’ve not changed how we’ve approached our games based upon Game Pass,” Urquhart argues, but admits that they have changed how the team measures its successes.

“I can’t go off and spend a billion dollars and only a million hours get played on Game Pass, ‘cause people aren’t paying that much for their subscriptions. And so a lot of it is really kind of looking, ‘Okay, well what do we think success is?’”

Plenty of people still buy games outright for now, especially on PC. But alongside sales estimates, games are now judged by how many millions of hours of gameplay they’ve driven on Game Pass, with Microsoft keen to drive subscriptions and keep Game Pass players on the service for longer.

That’s a boon for developers of lengthy RPGs or online multiplayer games that encourage repeat players, but doesn’t necessarily help shorter – or stranger experiences – like Pentiment, a game for which he admits there was “a little less of that algebra” to predict if it would be a hit, and a little more of a throw of the dice.

Time played is very much a metric they use, shorter experiences like Hi-Fi Rush are harder to predict.

@thepanzini: Funny thing about that statement is that in November Obsidian said the complete opposite vis-a-vis games, Game Pass and Pentiment. Makes it seem like they don't really themselves at this point.

@thepanzini: Time played on Game Pass is a metric they use, but the patterns there are not necessarily the same as on Steam. That's why I mentioned the Xbox time played as probably a closer match (since PC Game Pass players don't go through Steam.) Game Pass games get a much more diverse crowd than Steam in terms of tastes because you don't have to plunk down $30 to try a game so many more people bail early on. You see this all the time based on achievement completion percentages, which change radically as soon as a game hits Game Pass. A lot of people try it and bail, and few will stick with a game to the end. Therefore a short game where 50% of players play a quarter of it might have more game time than a longer game where most people bail very early, and those don't necessarily match Steam patterns.

Regardless by all the indicators we have (Steam sales, Xbox game time, critics, etc...) Hi Fi RUSH looks like a success so far.

But that doesn't tell us anything about Rumbleverse.

Honestly if you asked me which seemed like a better bet, a cell shaded rhythm action platformer that would have been at home on the Gamecube (though with worse graphics of course) or a melee/wrestling battle royale with decent graphics and humor I don't know what I would have said.

Clearly Epic thought the game was a good idea and they have the market research of running a whole store and the biggest game on Earth. Then again Fortnite was kind of a happy accident when a long in development hell PVE game got an 11th hour retrofit to be a battle royale and became a historically huge hit.

Making video games is hard but predicting the video game market is maybe even harder.

Obviously, I don't know the specific financial situation or the server infrastructure for Rumbleverse, but I'm going to assume it's like most Internet industries where the servers are rented from some cloud computing provider.

Even if nobody's playing the game, there's always a price floor because, even if a computer is sitting at idle, it's still pulling power, it's still generating heat, it's still a resource to be monitored, it's still taking up a license for OS, Virtualization environment, it still needs Internet, etc. That can easily be tens of thousands of dollars a year, right there. Then you have staffing costs -- somebody has to watch all this stuff. More likely an entire team, since, theoretically, somebody is on watch 24/7. Even the best designed and maintained environments has significant labour costs assigned to it -- people investigating bug reports, updating software packages, doing security audits, etc. Most environments that I've encountered in my career, there's also always a bunch of "joe jobs" which could be automated, but nobody has time in the moment, so some poor schmuck has to pull the report manually, run the clean-up job, etc.

Thus, including labour, you're probably on the order of several hundred thousand a year minimum. Probably more, because I'm not counting any game specific costs - licensing, game specific support, game dev environments, etc. And this is for minimum support -- if they ever get several thousand concurrent users, costs shoot up really fast.

So, in other words -- it's not chump change. Given that Epic and IG are privately held, we have no idea what their cash positions are, or any idea what their strategic priorities are, so, I can't tell you whether burning half a million to a million a year is even possible. But it's not like the old days where you could stick a bunch of servers in an unused corner of your office and keep it up indefinitely for couple hundred bucks a month.

@turtlefish: I'm somewhat skeptical. I don't doubt your expertise nor that the things you say have to be done, but none of them need dedicated staff because these companies are all already doing this stuff for other games. Square runs Final Fantasy XIV and Avengers. That means it already has server rental agreements and a whole infrastructure to do the stuff you're talking about in place. Adding a few servers to that operation isn't the same cost as starting up from scratch. You may need someone on call 24/7 but you don't need that to be their only job. You can train some of the FF XIV staff to be able to do whatever random stuff comes up for Babylon's Fall when it does come up. If your server environment is decently well designed and you've thought ahead to try to make it as similar to the other environments as you can presumably it wouldn't take very long for someone to get up to speed enough to handle most situations. The same for everything else. IF you've got a team doing server audits already adding a few servers to their workload isn't that expensive.

Now maybe Babylon's FAll was super poorly designed on the back end and is a nightmare to maintain (or at least to learn to maintain if your primary job is FF XIV.) Or maybe there's other issues. But I really don't think it would be as expensive as you claim to just add a few additional servers to an already large operation.

And of course there are lots of games that aren't very popular and run quietly for years even with smaller publishers without costing a massive amount. Granted as you said it's cheaper to run servers in prior generations that didn't do much, but Final Fantasy XI's PS2 servers stayed up until 2016, a full 10 years after the release of the PS3, and I can't imagine they were making a ton.off that.

My guess is that the costs are in the tens of thousands and sustainable for companies like Epic (which spends tens of millions on its money losing store) but there just wasn't much upside. With Rumbleverse they cut bait early and refunded everyone so that they could get people to try again the next time without feeling burned. For Square and Babylon's Fall my guess is it did so poorly that there just weren't a lot of fans to get upset in the first place, and Square doesn't seem like the kind of company that will think ahead to "next time we try to sell a live service game people will be hesitant because we burned them this time."

I never got around to playing Rumbleverse, but I remember watching a Grimmz twitch stream months ago and he claimed the game was dying even then and thought it was a shame. I know Jeff G liked the game a lot because he likes wrestling in general. And there is something to the fact the game was focused around brawling, so you had a better chance of winning. Not like those other Battle Royals, where you run around for 5 mins only to get one shot by a sniper, or ambushed by a team and lose. The thing is, most people like the shooting ones better. Which is why I personally cant get into Battle Royals in general.

It never stood a chance with that art style. I know at least I couldn't stand it. It's a mixture of bland and repulsive.

These games aren't made to be enjoyed years from now so i don't feel like honouring their passing, there will be a hundred more free to play temporary experiences for you to enjoy this year.

@bigsocrates: With all due respect, this is where the whole "It can't be THAT hard" thought comes into play. :)

Server pools don't usually work that way i.e. not everything is interchangeable. Like, FFXIV and Avengers probably don't share the same server pool because they have custom configurations / software/processes for each game, as well as different resource allocation limits. Stuff I've worked on, compute resources are separated by task and application, because I never ever want to tell the boss "Hey, our website is down because somebody internally decided to run some extra database reports." And staff have their area of expertise, even within systems -- being able to run FFXIV servers isn't the same as being able to run Avengers servers, because the software is different or configured differently. Hell, even where there's commonality (e.g. if FFXIV and Avengers used the same core database engine) I bet the databases are different enough that it would take more than a few hours -- or a few weeks -- to get people up to speed.

Now, is it possible to build interchangeable servers across multiple independent applications, while avoiding resource allocation problems? Sure it is... but it's a hell of a lot of work, which means it's a hell of a lot of money and I'm guessing for most people writing games, they're not going to bother. Something I tell my coders all the time is "process is not product" -- the end user doesn't give a damn if we've got a bank of generic DB servers all beautifully interchangeable, or a single custom DB server that somebody spent 5 years writing internally 15 years ago -- all they care about is that the product works. As such, most places put in just enough process to keep everything from going to hell, and then focus on the actual product -- because additional process adds overhead, and makes it less likely you'll be able to ship something profitably. (This, incidentally, is why almost every online launch of a highly anticipated game turns into a dumpster fire -- you CAN put in all the processes and resources to make sure your online launch is successful regardless of load, but then your game costs as much as the NASA SLS system, and you'll never make a dime off the game.)

Something that also works against Rumbleverse or other newer games are that they're newer games, and so has all the new game bugs, potentially. Older games require less infrastructure and work because a) they're designed for older hardware, so Moore's law (or it's replacement) works in their favour and b) they're old enough that all the major bugs have been banged out, so, they just need less support in general.

And, what people forget, is the licensing side. That's tens of thousands a year alone, depending on what software they license. And remember it's not just systems/server stuff - depending on the agreement they have with middleware (Speedtree etc.), they might have to pay ongoing fees for that stuff as well.

In short - when you run at scale, everything is hard -- databases are hard, systems are hard, code is hard. And so, it gets really expensive, really fast. Exponential modifier when you're dealing with the outside public so you're also dealing with hackers, cheaters, spurious/vague bug reports, etc.

In any event, it's all speculation. We don't know financials, what the publishing deal was, specifics of infrastructure, etc. But, unless Square/Epic/Iron Galaxy have really amazing I.T. departments and really amazing developers, really sweetheart licensing deals and top flight project management/process management -- I really do think costs are going to be way more than 'tens of thousands.' (And note, this is taking nothing away from the quality of the people involved. But as I said above, this stuff is HARD. It's a miracle anything works, IMHO.)

@turtlefish: You know more about this than I do and neither of us knows the specifics of Square's server architecture let alone their deals to rent, service, and license the relevant hardware and software.

What I will say is that if your estimates are correct that makes the decision to have games like Babylon's Fall and Outriders be always online more baffling because we can both agree that just having locally hosted games based on matchmaking can be done long term on the cheap, and both those games have maximum game sizes of 4 and 3 respectively, making them easily within the size of games that can be played with local hosting.

This doesn't really apply to something like Rumbleverse, but it is wild to me if Squenix really planned to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually (more if the game was popular) just to...keep people from cheating in Babylon's Fall? I don't really understand the point of forced always online in games like that. And of course we know from prior experience that it's quite possible to make games that can be locally matched OR run on dedicated servers, allowing you to take the expensive dedicated servers down and leave the cheap matchmaking servers up (Gears of War did this and last I checked GoW can still be played online because of it) so if you're right about the costs this whole series of decisions just seems crazier to me.

Of course Rumbleverse HAD to be always online because of what the game was so it's a different story there.