Comment by MrStonedOne

/tg/station, the largest open source multiplayer video game on github, gets cloudheads trying to help us "modernize" the game server for the cloud all the time.

Here's how that breaks down:

The servers (sorry, i mean compute) cost the same (before bandwidth, more on that at the bottom) to host one game server as we pay (amortized) per game server to host 5 game servers on a rented dedicated server. ($175/month for the rented server with 64gb of ram and a 10gbit uplink)

They run twice as slow because high core count slow clock speed servers aren't all they are cracked up to be, and our game engine is single threaded, but even if it wasn't, there is an overhead to multithreading things which combined with most high core count servers also having slow clock speed, rarely squares out to an actual increase in real world performance.

You can get the high clock speed units, they are twice to three times as expensive. And still run 20% slower over windows vms on rented bare metal because the sad fact is enterprise cpus by either intel or amd have slower clock speeds and single threaded performance then their gaming cpu counterparts, and getting gaming cpus for rented servers is piss easy, but next to impossible for cloud servers.

Each game server uses 2tb of bandwidth to host 70 player high pops. This works with 5 servers on 1 machine because our hosting provider gives us 15tb of bandwidth included in the price of the server.

Well now the cloud bill just got a new 0. 10 to 30x more expensive once you remember to price in bandwidth isn't looking too great.

"but it would make it cheaper for small downstreams to start out" until another youtuber mentions our tiny game, and every game server is hitting the 120 hard pop cap, and a bunch of downstreams get a surprise 4 digit bill for what would normally run 2 digits.

The take away from this being that even adding in docker or k8s deployment support to the game server is seen as creating the risk some kid bankrupts themselves trying to host a game server of their favorite game off their mcdonalds paycheck, and we tell such tech "pros" to sod off with their trendy money wasters.