How would you blance the price of a MMO or PUBG style game with Unity networking costs?

News & General Discussion
1

Let’s say you write an MOBA or PUBG style multi-player game and use Unity and UNET what would you need to charge to keep a really successful game up and running using Unity?

e.g.

  • PUBG has 3 million concurrent users.
  • Overwatch had 10 million players.

Using the Unity Multiplayer Service Calculator produces:

Summary
Monthly active players: 500,000
Concurrent players: 5,000
Bandwidth/player: 7.81KB/sec
Total bandwidth/month: 19.58GB
Price per GB: $0.49
500,000
Estimated players/month

$4,797.13
Estimated cost/month

So in theory:

  • PUBG would cost $28,782.78 per month or $0.00959426 per player per month
  • Overwatch would cost $95,942.6 per month or $0.00959426 per player per month

Or as long as you charge more than $0.01 per player per month you would be in profit, right?

With this type of pricing model/profit margins, why aren’t all Unity developer making MOBA/PUBG style multiplayer games?

On a side not why is the free CCU of Unity so low e.g. Personal CCU 20 is this limiting people from pushing for PUBG style 100 CCU games?

2

Because you’ve posted obvious outliers in the genre, ignored development costs, and ignored the fact that they may just not want to.

3

You are aware that Unity’s service is solely matchmaking and relay, correct? Using the services provided by major platforms (Steam, consoles, and so on) would basically eliminate this cost. Worst case if you did need your own (perhaps you want to have everyone on the exact same lobby if possible) you could just create and host your own master server for far cheaper.

It’s intended solely for development purposes. Once you publish the actual limitation goes away and you start paying for it.

4

And the advertisement cost, maintenance cost,…etc. The Infrastructure should not be the largest portion of the game cost.

5

Once you’ve got your “per month” cost for players, multiply that by the number of months you think they’ll be active, and then make sure you include that - as well as all the stuff the others have mentioned - in your cost of goods when deciding on pricing.

If you assign 50c for that component of your cost of goods then you’re likely to cover far more than the lifetime of the game, assuming your figures are correct.

Edit: Oops, I treated months as years. Adjusted.

6

You left out basically 90% of the cost factors in running an infrastructure for a game like that.

Basically take your number multiply it by 10 to 15, that will be closer.

Edit: That’s infrastructure maintenance/deployment/etc costs alone. Doesn’t count development and other ongoing production costs.

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7

Staffing alone is many, many times that.

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8

Also imagine competing against such huge games like pubg and fortnite.

9

This now “reasons to be depressed” thread.

10

two words: loot boxes

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11

First of all, if you wrote PUBG in Unity, you would not use UNET. You would build your own custom networking layer designed for your exact situation. You would most likely rent a bunch of cloud hosting instances through Amazon’s AWS for the game server instances. That is what PUBG does.

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