Gaming Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'

[The Helper]

"Wait, maybe we'll go bankrupt from server fees?" joked the Pocketpair CEO.

Monster-collecting survival game Palworld has amassed an astonishing 19 million players, and that extraordinary success isn't coming cheap for its indie developer: Palworld's projected February server costs are over 70 million yen, according to a post from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe. That comes to over $475,000 USD.

"Wait, maybe we'll go bankrupt from server fees?" joked Mizobe (machine translated from Japanese).

I wouldn't worry too much. Pocketpair says it's sold about 12 million copies of Palworld on Steam. At $30 each, that puts Palworld's gross revenue at $360 million so far, and that's ignoring its Xbox sales (it's on Game Pass, too).

Steam's revenue cut drops from 30% to 20% after a certain threshold, but for the sake of argument, let's just give Steam a flat 30% cut of that $360 million. That still leaves Pocketpair with $252 million before expenses. $6 million a year in server costs doesn't look quite so untenable next to that number.

Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what'

"Wait, maybe we'll go bankrupt from server fees?" joked the Pocketpair CEO.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Blackveiled]

Seems pretty justifiable in server costs. Although not very comparable, I ran a Minecraft server in 2011 with roughly averaging 1K users online at any given point of time. Server costed around $80-100 a month to maintain. 1,000,000 users at a similar price point would be about $100k a month. Of course, server optimization and what not would factor into this. I wouldn't be surprised to expect DLC or Microtransactions to help offset this cost.