[MUD-Dev] business models

[Vincent Archer]

According to Batir:

> I'm not sure I see how this is a plus...  Instead of 50,000 (as an
> example) customers in the US connecting to your servers, you have
> those, plus the European customers, plus the Asian customers?  Sure,
> the percentage of the total is lower at any given moment, but the
> total for the day will be much higher...  (Not to say I like
> staggered deployment, I just don't see how simultaneous release
> helps the servers.)

Because your servers are tailored for peak usage, not 24h usage. It
does not matter if 2000 asians play, then 2000 europeans, then 2000
americans, you still need only one server that can host 2000 people at
the same time.

So you get more overall customers at release (and also later) for the
same investment in hardware and bandwidth. The only thing you need is
a larger database size. Judging from the price of SCSI disks these
days, this is a fairly minor increase in server price.

Of course, the world is not perfect, and it's not 33%-33%-33%. I don't
have hard numbers, but my own personal impressions gives something
along 45%-30%-25% for US/Asia/Europe splits. If the number of UO
servers is an indication, if might be even worse (50%-35%-15%), but UO
wasn't available in Europe (in a reliable manner, i.e. outside of
specialized import stores) till late, at about the time the other two
classics (EQ/AC) arrived on the european market.

Still, if you expect twice as many initial subscribers as a US-only
release, you can afford to put on-line at least 50% more servers to
absorb the peak load. And later, when things have settled, you can
expect to cover twice the userbase (twice the revenue) for the same
amount of servers (about the same bandwidth costs). Looks like a
winner for me :)

> As for non localized servers, doesn't this make it difficult for
> European and Asian customers to play when the server is in the US,
> or vice versa?  I would think the increased lag would make the game
> pretty much unplayable.  I wouldn't even try to play the European or
> Asian shards of UO.

That depends on your game design. If lag is an issue, then you cannot
afford shortcuts, and need to have localised servers. I took EQ as an
example because lag is pretty much a non-issue in EQ. You can play
without any problems until your ping rises over 450... UO is more
ping-sensitive.  And I expect any game with PvP issues to be
relatively ping-sensitive too, which negates some of my arguments
here, of course.

--
Vincent Archer                                         Email: archer at nevrax.com

Nevrax France.                              Off on the yellow brick road we go!
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