The Cost of Running an MMO Mod Thread

For some people who think MMO mods should be free because, hey, it's a game, and games should be free.

What is your definition of Massive Multiplayer? 1000 players minimum? Fine. The Source engine has shown a mean of 24 players per server without getting overly laggy.

That's 42 servers. Based on current HL2DM, CSS, and DoDS server prices, I've found the mean price to be $65USD.

This means that the MONTHLY cost of running an MMO mod would be around $2,730. Add in the mean cost of a website with adequate storage and bandwidth and security enough to use as a database, $2,846. Almost $3,000 A MONTH to run, and there are those that expect it to be free.

1,000 players = $3,000 per month - Players pay $3/mo
2,500 players = $7,000 per month - Players pay $2.80/mo
5,000 players = $14,000 per month - Players pay $2.80/mo
10,000 players = $27,000 per month - Players pay $2.70/mo

And these are just base and highly averaged prices(the prices should show a downward trend like they do here). Those having to charge will be willing to turn a profit from this, so prices can be expected to be raised to $5.00 minimum. Add in advertising and team salaries, these can easily reach MMO standard levels.

eek... if you start charging people to play the 'mod' too, arn't you breaking some kind of rules for using the unlicenced source engine?

Interestng research

Steam is going to let you charge.

actually this isnt true, i know someone who runs a 3000 person server for an mmo, and it costs 3000 a month! this isnt based on what u did above, its based on the server... those calculations above are completely incorrect

It's called running your own server bitches. If you really want to make an MMO, you'll learn what you need and how to do it. Enough said.

A 3000 person "server" would require over 100 HL2 servers since the Source engine has proven itself to only be able to handle 24-30 players. If anything, I was being very generous with those estimates.

Edited by: Ben

No one with any sense would use Source to make an MMO. There are many other, better options, which would work out much cheaper.

It's still a bad idea to run one though, unless you're very confident you'll get enough people playing to pay off the huge server bill.

i guess he wanted to point the problem out to all those kiddies making topics about ZOMG!! i make MMO on source but have no sK1ll0RZ!!, not in generel.

I said it was an mmo server which had over 7 mb upload/download rate and it does cost him 3000, but the community pays for alomost all of it. There is no possible way to have a hl2 server with over 1000 people, unless everyone has a insanely fast connection/super computers!

cheeseyballz wrote: There is no possible way to have a hl2 server with over 1000 people, unless everyone has a insanely fast connection/super computers!

You have no idea what you're talking about

Chunky.The.Tree wrote:

cheeseyballz wrote: There is no possible way to have a hl2 server with over 1000 people, unless everyone has a insanely fast connection/super computers!

You have no idea what you're talking about

he has... hl2 is simply not made for many players on one heap.

That, and you pretty much need access to the complete engine to be able to suit it for a MMOG.

Yes fools. It is hioghly inpractible to make an MMO using the Source network library, as suitable as it may be for FPS. Also, you would have to re-write the physics, materials, animation and almost everything else, leaving you with a pipeline that is inferior to a lot of OSS alternatives.

Also, server costs are so variable, and yes, you would need to run your own server, preferable a cluster, and the least you would want to spend on a server would be $20,000 and you would still need another couple of thousand a month for the internet connection. Don't make an MMO unless you are rich, a professional game development studio or the president of an ISP.

Well, technically, you are paying to use their/his server and not for the actual mod it self but still bad idea.(and I have no idea about the true legality of this so, simply Dont Do This)

Ok, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you have no clue as to what all would go into an MMO.

Let's start with bandwidth & hardware. I know what Im talking about because Im actually developing an MMO...and I attended the Austin Game Design Conference, where I spoke with several professional-grade MMO hosting companies.

I recently got an email response from one of them...take a read:

From: James H
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 9:55 AM
To: 'Alfred Norris' anorris@interplay.com
Subject: RE: Great to meet you at the Austin Games Conference

Dear Alfred

Thanks for this. Our website is XXXXX - needs updating but there you go.

I have also attached a company overview and price list. Re. your breakdown - don't hold me to any of this but:

25 Servers

- You will probably need three tiers of server - Game / Web / DB

The game and web servers, for the purposes of this conversation, balance out at around $325 - $350 per month including colo, power, tier one support. The DB servers (4GB RAM + Fiber Channel Card for SAN Storage or RAID 5 multiple drives) are usually closer to $1000 a month - so you need to determine how many DB servers you need in that 25 server stack. As I mentioned, if you look at 1U servers you also need to figure in switches (Cisco 3650 or similar). You don't need switching with the blade centers, but if you plan to do hardware load balancing (Layer 7 switching) we would have to figure that in too. A dedicated firewall for 40 - 60 Megs of traffic would be ABOUT $350 a month, assuming not all traffic needs to be secure. But roughly, if we say you have 20 game / web servers plus 5 DB servers, you're at

20 x 350 = $7000
5 x 900 = $4500

= $11500 for your hardware, so your $6500 is not realistic. - but the above represents around $150k of hardware before you start looking at colocation, support, warranties, replacement, finance charges, cables, installation etc.

60 Mbps at our standard rate is billed at $75 per Mbps so = $4500 ( I would say that 60 Mbps is low for 25 game servers - more like 150 Mbps @ $70 = $10500). So your bandwidth estimate is closer.

But assuming 60 Mbps,

Hardware: $11500
Bandwidth: $4500

TOTAL = $16,000 per month.

To put this into context, if your game is running 20 game servers, with 500 users per server, this would be give you the means to support 10,000 concurrent users. We usually work on the premise that 30% of your subscriber base will be online at any one time (although it's probably more likely to be 15% or so). At 30%, your 10,000 concurrent users would mean 30,000 subscribers, so if they are paying you $10 a month, you have revenues of $300,000 per month. $16,000 for your infrastucture including 24/7 support (15 minute response guarantee) means 53 cents per user per month.

A couple of other key things to bear in mind.

- Your OS - if you are using anything other than a true open source OS such as Linux plus MySQL, you are going to be looking at something like $799 per game server (assuming Windows Server 2003 Standard) and between $3,000 and $6,000 per server if you use MSSQL Standard or Advanced for your DB's). So across 20 game servers and 5 DB servers, you would be looking at $30,000 in upfront DB costs at a minimum. Higher end games use a commercial DB solution, such as Informix or Oracle, but in the case of Informix, this means $56,000 per CPU (so if you have five dual cpu boxes running your DB, that's $560,000 for your DB software). Oracle runs into the millions of $. SO - we do suggest looking very closely at open source solutions for your servers and DB architecture.
- Storage

We have a 32TB Fiber Channel SAN storage available, and we find this is the best solution to backup large data sets such as your customer / account / character DB. To all extents and purposes it's the same as RAID 5, except you get muvch better redundancy, reliablity and speed (there's 2GB of front end cache on the SAN as opposed to a MAX of 128MB, usually 16MB on regular SCSI HDD. If you look at our price list, you can see what we charge for SAN storage - down to around $1.00 per GB per month. So if you're backing up 1TB of data, it's going to cost around $4000 per month. This is preferable to building your own mass storage solution eg the SAN costs around 1.2 million (you can do it more cheaply but then the reliablity suffers).

SO

Overall costing assuming open source architecture - I'll actually assume 100Mbps connection.

HARDWARE: $11500
BANDWIDTH : $7000
STORAGE (assume 1TB): $4000

= $22500

which at our 30,000 subscriber level is around 75 cents per user from a $10.

As I mentioned in Austin, this is all highly reliable and redundant infrastructure, with a multi-homed Tier 1 carrier network. You will find cheaper options, but the key differences will be lack of reliablity and scalability, additional support and warranty costs, ultimately a higher rate of network failure. Our aim is to be the most attractive, cost effective quality option.

Can you give me a timeframe on when your game is going to reach alpha / beta / commercial?

Cheers,

James
*****************

Ok...now thats just the beginning...we havent gotten into customer service, advertising, keeping staff on to make more content, ...the list goes on and on.

I know it's tempting to think that if you can make a successful mod that it would be only a little harder to make an MMO...but its A TON harder.

Cool, thanks for posting that up. It's nice to see some more detailed information about MMO costs.

Boy am I glad that I only PLAY MMOs.