6 minutes ago, KillerKlient said:

how are so many tripple A game titles running their servers without subscriptions?

Really, they aren't. Large scale multiplayer games either operate on a subscription model or put out a new game every 1-2 years for full price again, and generally retire old game servers rather quickly. What's the functional difference between paying $59.99 for the latest Madden or CoD vs paying $4.99/mo for a subscription? About $0.10.

2 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Really, they aren't. Large scale multiplayer games either operate on a subscription model or put out a new game every 1-2 years for full price again, and generally retire old game servers rather quickly. What's the functional difference between paying $59.99 for the latest Madden or CoD vs paying $4.99/mo for a subscription? About $0.10.

Rainbow Six Siege, is priced ulrta low from day 1 (can be had for £6 in the Ubisoft sales).  Has had servers running since 2015 with consistent quartly game updates that include new maps, weapons, operators, skins, etc and guess what - they DON'T charge a subscription model and their player count is increasing!

6 minutes ago, KillerKlient said:

You're assuming Microsoft charge the same amount for Azure to their low end external custmoers as they do internally to themselves? Microsoft have special rates for big customers and even better rates for themselves.

40K concurrent users in flight sim? Doubtful lol, there are tripple A titles out there that just about manage that.

I'm saying MS themselves has a bottom line cost of services, that it costs for them to produce, given their operating costs publicly reported. And I've already taken that into account in the analysis, if you notice.

Maybe 40k is high, maybe not. I don't really think of EVE as a AAA title, but it manages that. Again, I personally think that they'll try to avoid a sub model, if they can. But it certainly wouldn't be offensive if they went there.

-Matt N

6 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Really, they aren't. Large scale multiplayer games either operate on a subscription model or put out a new game every 1-2 years for full price again, and generally retire old game servers rather quickly. What's the functional difference between paying $59.99 for the latest Madden or CoD vs paying $4.99/mo for a subscription? About $0.10.

Believe me, this is way Microsoft management is thinking about pricing 😉

2 minutes ago, KillerKlient said:

and guess what - they DON'T charge a subscription model and their player count is increasing!

Agreed, but they do receive a significant amount of revenue from microtransactions. Running game dev isn't a charity.

I assume that the community would be even more incensed to find microtransactions than a subscription model.

-Matt N

Just now, MattNischan said:

I'm saying MS themselves has a bottom line cost of services, that it costs for them to produce, given their operating costs publicly reported. And I've already taken that into account in the analysis, if you notice.

Maybe 40k is high, maybe not. I don't really think of EVE as a AAA title, but it manages that. Again, I personally think that they'll try to avoid a sub model, if they can. But it certainly wouldn't be offensive if they went there.

-Matt N

You cannot take a public price for a low end user, randomly take 35% off the price and assume that's what Microsoft pays for it lol.  The whole point of Microsoft owning Azure means the cost of them using it themselves is a much more complex calculation.

To run a cloud service like Azure, means you have to have a lot of extra compute that will be idle a lot of the time which is a wasted cost, by MS utilitising those wasted resources that is already a saving that is factored into that calculation.  There are many more things they will have to factor, but I'll keep my point brief.

5 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Agreed, but they do receive a significant amount of revenue from microtransactions. Running game dev isn't a charity.

I assume that the community would be even more incensed to find microtransactions than a subscription model.

-Matt N

THAT'S MY POINT, why does no one understand this.  It really annoys me when people jump to the conclusion that "subscription is the only way" lol.  It is proven that you can make expensive game servers and ongoing development profitable WITHOUT subscriptions. 

3 minutes ago, KillerKlient said:

To run a cloud service like Azure, means you have to have a lot of extra compute that will be idle a lot of the time which is a wasted cost, by MS utilitising those wasted resources that is already a saving that is factored into that calculation.  There are many more things they will have to factor, but I'll keep my point brief.

This is sorta getting off the rails, but that just doesn't track at all with any cloud implementation I've been a part of. The way Azure stays profitable is by keeping a tight lid on overprovisioning hardware. Hardware that is just idling above your calculated percentage is just costing you money and not benefiting the architecture.

MSFS's demand peaks will not be able to be pushed around, it's a real time game. It's going to have the most demand during primetime US and EU hours, just like the majority of cloud loads do. So, if MSFS adds 5% more demand at peak times (a ludicrously huge number given Azure's size, but the actual value is not relevant), no impl team is gonna allow you to just eat 5% into the calculated overhead, you still need to buy 5% more capacity in hardware to keep that overhead the same for bursty loads. There's no "free ride" just because you own the hardware.

Anyway, as usual these things tend to devolve a bit into bickering, and I think I've said my piece.

-Matt N

21 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Agreed, but they do receive a significant amount of revenue from microtransactions. Running game dev isn't a charity.

I assume that the community would be even more incensed to find microtransactions than a subscription model.

-Matt N

You are sooooo out of touch

1 minute ago, Krakin said:

You are sooooo out of touch

Are you saying the flightsim community would be more on board with microtransactions than they would be with a small subscription?

I mean, I don't really hang here that often, but that certainly seems counter to my understanding. I could be wrong, who knows.

-Matt N

On 10/29/2019 at 3:57 PM, MattNischan said:

This is sorta getting off the rails, but that just doesn't track at all with any cloud implementation I've been a part of. The way Azure stays profitable is by keeping a tight lid on overprovisioning hardware. Hardware that is just idling above your calculated percentage is just costing you money and not benefiting the architecture.

Anyway, as usual these things tend to devolve a bit into bickering, and I think I've said my piece.

-Matt N

That is true to a certain extent, you do  aim to run a lean operation but you must always have lots of idle resources (networking, cooling, storage, servers, etc) - that is just the nature of the business and massive expensive - as the owner of these idle resources they are able to utilize them in more efficient and clever manner than an external customer.  In our business, when there is a big event we upscale our services on these cloud platforms massively - when this happens there is no one running around at Microsoft shoving in new RAM sticks into servers for us, the resources are already there and ready to be utilised.  But as soon as the event is over, we downscale and those resources are now unused and costing money.  To utilize your own resources is a way of effectively paying yourself for your own costs.

The money will come from Game Pass.

The next Xbox show will be next week in London.

Edited October 29, 20196 yr by rjfry

Crackdown 3 has multiplayer servers and is also augmented by Azure for it's environmental destruction physics calculations...............................NO SUBSCRIPTION

Edited October 29, 20196 yr by Krakin

Poor Microsoft, does any have any idea how much subsidies the government gives them? I have absolutely no idea.

51 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Azure is an enormous department that is certainly not at all free of cost. And the video provided talks nothing of the Xbox division's costs at all, only that there was some available datacenter space for the streaming project. Actually, the way I take that is that Xbox's streaming platform is not running on top of the Azure platform at all, it just happens to reside in the same real estate.

 

I'm amazed that you watched the video and came away with that. Phil Spencer is the head of Xbox and in another video he actually said the cost of piggybacking on Azure is "cheap". In the video posted he said the cement is already cast, the air conditioning is in place and the staff to keep it running is already hired. With all of that in place it's just a simple matter of using what's already available. You could waste time with your speculative calculations or just listen to the man paying the bills. It's up to you.