I was actually a little disappointed. Friends of mine were huge GT fans and played the shit out of it, but when I played it I found the AI opponents horribly stupid and the missing damage model was mildly weird, to say the least. I expected more than what I got. It wasn’t a bad game, but just not what I expected.
That’s how I ended up buying a PS3 back when GTA V was released. Well, that and Gran Turismo and wanting a Blu-ray player. But it was still not really worth it.
Typically scales fractional to the user count and often in steps. These costs stay relatively stable no matter if you have 1 or 10000 players (for example), then rise a bit to support 18000 players, etc. And they should not start out high enough to require a loan just for them.
If you build an MMO and get a sudden influx of millions on players… ok. Then maybe. But they typically also grow somewhat organically.
Each user causing you direct costs that even increase with their usage is… not optimal. But hey, it’s worth a shot, I guess.
If the game uses the Steam SDK, they “of course” can at least check that the request comes from an authorized game (SSO via Steam). But sure, people who bought the game can still easily troll the dev, unless they also employ some kind of anti-cheat system. But from what it sounds like even then a troll could simply play the game excessively and then ramp up costs for the dev.
Only if the client is making the requests directly. If your own infrastructure is in between (which it should), you can limit the kind of requests and their rate at will.
Of course that’s an architecture I am not sure someone who develops something like this has on their mind.
But loans don’t scale with the amount of players and played hours. They typically purely factor into the cost of development and support.
Actually sounds like the perfect use case for a model like Jev. I think Jevos should be able to handle that locally.
I generally like their outcome, but hate the boilerplate. I think I need somewhere around 20 lines over two different files which would otherwise be a one-liner in a cron file.