Forums » Everything else » Cost of hosting games ( from a freeloader's point of view)

So I kind of just realized today how large games actually are. An average ImpactJS game ( with a few compressed sound and music files ) is around 5 mb.

I tried to do the math for hosting costs

* Hosting with Google App Engine *

Free -> with a 5 mb game and a 1 GB bandwidth quota per day, it can be said that we can only afford 200 unique gamers per day. ( 1 GB / 5 mb = 200 )

Paid -> any extra GBs will cost 12 cents.

Link: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/billing.html


* Hosting with Amazon S3 (assets only) *

similar model to Google, but they charge 15 cents/ GB after the 1 GB free quota is reached. The 15 cents generally reduces based on the tariff below:

Link:http://aws.amazon.com/s3/


* Hosting with TapJS *

Not sure how much our buddy Ken would be charging... feel free to layout some future plans.


Questions

1. Anyone has hosting alternatives to the 200 gamers/day constraint?

2. Optimizing the game ( file compression ) is possible, but I don't see much to be gained from it.

breakdown of my ImpactJS game:

Sound : 20 bitrate-reduced files, 250 kb
Music : 8 bitrate-reduced files, 3000 kb )
Sprites, tiles, fonts : 200 kb
Plugins : soundManager2, 500 kb
Game + ImpactJS files : unbaked 700 kb, baked maybe 350 kb?

From a 'freeloader' point of view, I'm super disappointed that App Engine can only support up to 200 gamers/day... anything more means we have to pay.

Let's say we have on average 1000 gamers playing the game per day, they would consume 1000 * 5 mb = 5 GB per day.

Since the first GB is free,

bandwidth costs would be 4 GB * 12 cents/day = $0.48/day

Total costs per month = $ 0.48 * 30 = $ 14.00/month

guess there's no such thing as a free lunch!

Hey fugufish, thanks for putting TapJS on the list! :)

As for TapJS cost: 100% FREE! :)

I do not charge to host your game(s) on TapJS. I'm not looking to make money off the backs of folks just making games for fun. So if you or anyone is looking for free game hosting, TapJS is a good option. If I do say so myself :)

That being said, I do have hopes/dreams of it actually making some money in the future.

NOTE anyone who signs up and hosts their games while TapJS is in beta will always have a free Pro account. A good reason to sign up now :)


My 3 Ideas for Monetization:

1. Custom Layouts - If someone does not like the standard TapJS page layout, for
a one time fee of $25 they can supply me with the html/css/images they would like use and I will implement a custom layout for their games. If they only have a jpg and want me to code it, then I would charge a one time fee of $99, to cover my time cutting up the image, coding the html, etc...

2. Pro Accounts - When TapJS gets out of beta, I am toying with the idea of having both Free and Pro accounts. With Pro accounts, you will be able to use your own domain, view reports and analytics, easily integrate with Google Chrome store, turn off TapJS ad's or choose to leave them for a 50/50 split, and maybe a couple other bells and whistles. Right now the price point i'm toying with is between $10 - $25 a year per account, not per game (unlimited games.)

3. Ad's - As it grows, to help cover some of the costs, I MAY put small ads on the free account pages, below the game. Pro accounts can choose to turn them off or leave on for a 50/50 split. As the game developer for either Free or Pro accounts, you can put as many ads around your game as you wish. I'm all for someone trying to make a buck from their hard work. :)

Again, for the folks who sign up and start using TapJS now while in beta, you will see and get to use all of the Pro account features for free. Then once TapJS gets out of beta, you will continue to be a Pro account free for life. It's not on the TapJS site publicly but if you go to http://tapjs.com/developer/register you can sign up for a beta account now and start hosting your games for free.

If anyone has any questions, please email me at ken@tapjs.com

@Ken - thanks for being transparent abt your plans! Keep it real!


on another note, I just thought of a cheap way to circumvent the App Engine pay wall... with NO COST INCURRED!

for a game with 500 kb baked file and 4 Mb media files, we basically set up

a) ONE app for the baked game
b) N apps for media files ( we basically distribute the 4 Mb load to N number of apps)

so we will only start paying if we hit the following walls:

when the app in a) reaches 1 GB / 500 kb = 2000 users/day
when any one of the apps in b) reaches 1 GB / ( 4 Mb / N ) users/day. Eg: if N = 8, we get 2000 users/day

being able to support 2000 users/day, for FREE is pretty darned impressive! That's about 9 GB of bandwidth, distributed over 9 apps.

the thing is, we're gonna need to create a total of 9 apps, but hey they're all FREE!

PS: there's no limit to opening google accounts (and subsequently, app engine accounts )

Sorry to revive a super old thread, but I wanted to toss some ideas out there.

One solution I'd thought of was to ship the media files as part of a Chrome extension. The Chrome extension can detect that the player is visiting your site and write code to the page that allows your game to load them from the player's disk.

It's kind of limiting in that your game won't work for anyone not using Chrome... but, then again, it makes it easy to get people to pay for your game through the Chrome store.

If you're already going that route, of course, the simpler solution is to simply upload your app to the Chrome web store. But I thought the "media-files-as-extension" idea was neato. ( =

I think this all boils down to investment. If you're going to be making games, you need to put down some cash. It's not a lot but it makes a big difference in the quality of service you provide your users.

A base-level Mediatemple account (super easy hosting, all you have to do is ftp your files in) is $20/mo with 1TB of transfer. That's a lot of users you can serve.

$20 is easy enough to eat for the first month or two. Hopefully you'll have more than one game by then and it's really not too hard to make $20/mo in ad revenue.

Is it really worth $20 of your time to make N app engine apps and manage which ones serve which media assets? Seems overly complicated to me.

I am trying to find a good place to host a game that relies on node.js. I am very new to Node.js and don't fully understand how it works on the server side.

Are there any tutorials out there for deploying a game that requires node?

Have a look at [www.nodester.com] as an option.
I've tried a few and nodester worked the best for me.

Been wanting to try out https://no.de, but they only have limited free accounts available, and unfortunately no success there yet.

Then there's http://cloudno.de, [www.heroku.com] (think you might get a free account with facebook dev), windows azure (if you have msdn subscription)

and I'm sure there quite a few more

£3.30 a month, unlimited: https://www.unlimitedwebhosting.co.uk/index.php

Has some good uptime figures (mainly 100%) not sure how it handles stress though.

and free transferable domain name (transfer after 60days)

cloudno: Your account will be free during the beta test. You can keep your account and apps after the beta by switching to one of the paid plans or by selecting a free plan.