Now more than ever, releasing an online multiplayer game is a risky bet. The cost of developing and running a game with all the bells and whistles that enthusiasts expect can be astronomical, and there is no guarantee that anyone will show up to play it.Â
The spectacular collapse of the team-based shooter Concord illustrates the uncertainty that game makers face in bringing their products to market. Plagued by negative sentiment and low engagement, the game stumbled out of the gate, prompting Sony Interactive Entertainment to pull the plug on a property that reportedly took eight years and $200 million to develop.
âWhat they all saw was that not every live ops game is gonna succeed,â Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech journalist and editorial director at GamesBeat, told The Forecast.
âIt's the same basic problem for all games, which is that there are hits, and there are many, many misses,â he said.
Concord joined a growing list of high-profile commercial flops that were built to be blockbusters but failed to resonate with gaming audiences. Other big-budget duds include Highguard, reportedly funded by Tencent, which folded after seven weeks, and a trio of titles from Warner Bros. Games, MultiVerse, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, and the aptly-named Suicide Squad, for which the publisher took a cumulative $300 million loss.
Sideways growth in the gaming industry, combined with the stickiness of forever gamesâongoing games such as League of Legends and Fortnite that have shown tremendous staying powerâand an explosion of new apps that are soaking up younger generationsâ attention spans have created tough sledding for new releases, according to Takahashi.
âGambling and other addiction industries are booming. So, prediction markets, sports betting, AI companions, and all the AI slop out there, these things are growing so fast that they have to be taking time away from something,â he said.
Adverse conditions are coinciding with rising costs for data processing and hosting, which have steadily ticked higher over the past quarter century and have shot up nearly 9 percent since the dawn of generative AI, according to US Federal Reserve Economic Data.
All this spells trouble for game makers, inspiring them to go back to the drawing board with their infrastructure strategies. Looking to shore up their balance sheets, some are moving workloads away from public cloud platforms to environments where they can operate leaner.
âMany companies that we talk to nowadays, when they arenât in the position of having heavy lock-in, are going hybrid,â said Stefen Ideler, co-founder of i3D.net, a managed game hosting provider, in an interview with The Forecast.
i3D.netâs network of bare metal cloud data centers powers some of gamingâs best-selling franchises and the Discord social app.Â
Doing so can drive down the key âcost per play-sessionâ metric, he says, allowing studios to generate more revenue for funding new features or their next game. Other times, it is a matter of necessity.Â
âThey make the calculations and [see that they] can never be profitable [in the cloud],â he said.
Cloud Repatriation Spreads to Online Games
Mainly, Ideler unlocks hybrid cloud capabilities for companies that have never known anything but the cloud, or who have gone through their cloud journey and now want to go hybrid again. His efforts are reminiscent of a broader IT trend of cloud repatriation, where enterprises, disillusioned with public cloud vendors, are moving workloads to alternative solutions.Â
âInstead of putting all their eggs in one basket for one single cloud provider, we see companies going with data centers as a base layer, but then using two or three different cloud providers for that burst capacity,â he said.
A few years ago, such a move would have been unprecedented. Throughout the 2010s, game developers steadily flocked to the cloud, shedding data centers and dedicated hosting in favor of hyperscale compute that offered them ultimate flexibility. Cloud adoption meant they could avoid paying for hardware they did not need, house everything under one roof, and provision resources in minutes instead of weeks. Today, developers are thinking differently.Â
âThe realization has come at many, many companies that, even if you get the price down a bit with big, long-term commitments, the cost implications compared to going back to data centers and using the cloud for your flexible burst needs, the savings are massive,â said Ideler.Â
Game makers are anxious to leave, having identified their technology stack as a drain on profits. Yet in many cases, their games are deeply integrated with proprietary services, making a breakup difficult. Typically, these are microservices, container-wrapped programs used in gaming backends to do things such as support voice chat or group players of similar rank into matches.
âWhat we see is that, where there is financial lock-in, itâs hugely due to technical lock-in, where they might not just use cloud compute, but also an array of services from the cloud provider, sometimes even game-specific technologies, which greatly raises the technical barrier to move out,â he said.
Often, these applications are too entangled to be refactored. Ideler dedicates much of his time and energy to building exit ramps that help developers wiggle free of cloud vendor ecosystems. This requires the selective extrication of critical workloads from complicated backend infrastructure.Â
âSometimes it's migrating. Sometimes it's looking into the ability that the servers can talk to each other and stay in sync. Sometimes it also means removing the need to migrate everything, because picking up the whole tech stack and converting itâdevelopers don't want to touch that. ⊠So, we migrate tiny components,â he said.Â
For Live Ops Flexibility, Cloud is Still King
Not everyone foresees an exodus from public cloud services for games.Â
âBasically, the business has solidified on cloud, cloud, cloud, and a bit more cloud on top,â Stuart Muckley, CEO at Code Wizards, told The Forecast.
As a gaming consultancy and backend solution provider, his UK-based firm has engineered cloud-based infrastructure for several prominent multiplayer games, including the migration of Electronic Artsâ hit game Apex Legends to Amazon Web Services last year.
Single-cloud ecosystems offer perks that keep players happy, such as less downtime and shorter queues to get into matches, he contends.Â
He also says that game developers prefer using hyperscale infrastructure, as it allows them to extend the game over timeâpushing out new versions and creating new modesâwithout being constrained by a serverâs performance characteristics. Disks can be sped up. Memory and compute can be added. Data flow can be tweaked.Â
âThat flexibility is a massive advantage, because it means that we can bend the hardware to the will of the game, instead of trying to constantly re-optimize the game to work on the hardware that we have available,â he said.
To help keep costs down, his team constantly profiles the game server. This starts in development, optimizing the configuration as the game profile evolves. The process continues once the game is in the wild, where players can do things that are hard to anticipate, such as trap AI characters in endless loops or encamp in resource-heavy portions of the map, causing resource usage to rise.Â
âNobody has infinite money, so getting it optimized technically and financially is really important,â he said.
Jason Johnson is a contributing writer. He is a longtime content and copywriter for tech and tech-adjacent businesses. Find him on Linkedin.
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