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Operations pricing

The most cost-efficient way to operate your game

Get a managed operations service, but pay just for servers

You only pay for server usage, but you get a fully managed operations service. You won’t have to worry about building your own hybrid orchestration layer or managing your game servers. This reduces the time and money you’d normally spend on your backend.

  • Hardware sourcing, provisioning & management
  • Hybrid orchestration
  • Online services
  • 24/7 monitoring & support
  • Optimal machine & vendor recommendations
  • Cost forecasting
  • Assisted integration & onboarding
  • Testing, launching and cost-saving advice

More about Multiplayer Operations

Hybrid hosting for optimised costs

With the low cost of bare metal and the flexibility of cloud, our hybrid platform offers a low-risk, cost-effective way to host your game. And it’s available from day one, so you don’t need to spend time building and managing your own platform.

Cloud

Cloud is flexible, enabling you to scale computation up and down depending on demand. However, you pay two or three times as much for the equivalent hardware.

Bare metal

Bare metal is cheaper and gives you access to a greater number of locations and servers. But it can’t scale up or down on demand, as you normally have to reserve machines for a month or more.

Hybrid

Our hybrid platform offers the best of both. It uses low-cost bare metal when demand is low, and automatically transitions to cloud servers the moment demand spikes.

Finding the perfect machines & the optimal balance

Identifying the most cost-efficient setup can be a complex, time-consuming process. We can help with that. We’ll find the most cost-efficient balance of bare metal and cloud servers, and adjust this as your games’ needs change.

And because we’re always checking and testing our global network of server providers, we can recommend and source the optimal machine types for your game.

Our hybrid platform can save you >50% compared to pure-cloud hosting

For live games, the number of concurrent players (CCU) varies over the course of a day. If your servers don’t scale as well, then you’ll find yourself paying for redundant servers.

Cloud servers can scale by the minute, reducing redundancy. However, they’re much more expensive per server-hour than bare metal.

With our hybrid operations platform you get the best of both worlds. We maintain a base load of bare metal and then burst into the cloud at peak times. This minimises your expensive cloud usage whilst also reducing server redundancy.

We typically save studios more than 50% on their hosting costs compared to an all-cloud approach.

Let’s find the most cost-efficient setup together

Every game is different and every hosting solution should be, too. Get in touch and we can:

  • Recommend hosting infrastructure tailored to your needs by understanding your game and players.

  • Provide a detailed model to forecast your costs.

  • Talk you through our supported evaluation process.

Contact us

FAQ

You pay for managed game servers and storage, whether you’re using bare metal infrastructure, cloud infrastructure or our hybrid. If you’re using cloud infrastructure, we’ll also charge for egress (bandwidth).

  • We’ve provided some example cloud prices in our documentation.

  • We can’t provide generic prices for bare metal, as the prices vary depending on exact machine types, regions, reservation period, volume and other variables. Please contact us for an estimate.

  • With our hybrid platform, you can save more than 50% compared to a cloud-only approach. We can also help you save money compared to bare metal-only approaches by reducing the number of servers you need to reserve at peak times.

  • Compared to a DIY approach using unmanaged bare metal, we also save you the time and costs of building your own orchestration platform and managing your own game servers.

  • This is heavily game-dependent, with player numbers, player variability and game design all having an impact. We will provide a recommendation before launch based on indicators such as genre, social media following, and Steam wishlist data. After launch, we will review your usage regularly to optimise your infrastructure based on real player numbers.

  • We can provide an initial cost forecast shortly after you first speak to us and will continue to revise this estimate as we receive new data up to and after launch.

When using SpatialOS networking, you also need to host your game using Improbable’s Operations service. You need to pay for your game servers in addition to your networking instances. Visit our networking pricing page.

There is no relation between our Co-development pricing and our Operations pricing. Please visit our Co-development page

Please find out more by contacting us or reading our pricing documentation.

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