Oh okay, just wanted to make sure xD
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For just some lighter personal use I would not be interested in paying too much for an own planet. Like building a mansion and watching the untouched wilderness while the sun sets.
But for a guild where 10-20 persons pitch in for the fee I can imagine a much higher cost would be no problem at all.
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Perhaps we need size options too then. Especially when many guilds expect to have multiple contributors.
Also, I think it should be taken into consideration, that from what I understand, the most expensive aspect of sovereign worlds is not hosting or generating worlds, but storing locked worlds. Therefore, I think the price to store worlds for a month or two should be considered in the cost of rental. Additionally, this means that paying in advance for several months or longer could feasibly be ācheaperā than renting month to month as you would not need to pay the charges to cover storage every month.
The cheapest payment method overall would then be a recurring subscription service that does not end except for insufficient funds or manual cancelation.
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I donāt know how they are setting this up exactly, but I think some of you guys are on the high end of pricing.
I could be 100% wrong, but since the Sovereign planets are part of the main Universe, it seems they are & will remain 100% under their control. I donāt think weāre getting a Sovereign planet set up on our own dedicated server, with a control panel, get to select the hardware, etc. Without customizations, modding, and real control, I donāt think these rentals are going to cost a ton.
Maybe some version of the Creative worlds that can be modded in the future, could be set up like that.
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This is my understanding as well, however in one of the EARLIER (many moons ago) posts James mentioned those were planned for after the sovereign worlds.
As far as your Minecraft comparison, Iād imagine boundless requires considerably less resources. Java isnāt optimized very well to begin with and Minecraft is generating new land as you move about. Boundless maps are pre-generated and finite. Iām not overly computer savvy but Iād imagine the limitation would be on the cpu IF the worldās were loaded with people, simply not being able to keep up with the number of inputs.
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Yes, I think thatās why they added the sandbox worlds with Lua on the Discovery server. Iāll assume those will eventually lead to a singleplayer/local version, as well as a version that you can rent a server for and mod like crazy.
I think the prices will likely vary based on what tier world you want. Higher tier worlds will probably cost more than lower tier worlds. It makes sense that a t6 world would cost more than a t1.
Why? I can understand why the number of players that can access a planet at the same time will affect the price and possibly the size of the planet (20 regions versus 50). I do not see any reason why a tier 7 costs more to run than a tier 2.
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I can see size and player max being factors, but there isnāt a technical reason to make tier a factor.
I think it would be more of a perception problem if it was.
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Yeap. That would be slightly p2w.
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It is hard to guess and gauge, yes minecraft servers are that price, but other game servers ive paid $80 for 80 player limits servers. With some being $1 per player slot, with a minimum of X slots. So yeah some game servers costs around $15 for 10 people, and go up over $100 for 100 people ect.
So it is hard to guess what the price will be, since they have to figure server costs, maintenance cost, data required, ect, and we cant base it off of many normal scenarios for most game servers, as boundless in pretty unique in how it is release sovereign/creative worlds
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Agreed. Pricing is all over the place - thereās not really an average price either. So many variables to factor in.
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So here are so hard number and estimates. I just wanted to post these based on my experience as a developer and a game server admin. It is very important to point out how wildly this can vary so if the servers come out and they are $10/month, we can all celebrate. If they end up being $50/month (or more), hopefully this will help you understand and not just go āwhere did that come from?ā
Scalable: $10/month for a 8-10 player limit and +$2-5/month more to increase the player cap
This is if we can choose āhow bigā of a server we want and essentially choose the player cap for the world.
Fixed: $50-$80/month for dedicated hosts, $150+/month for cloud hosts.
This is if we cannot choose the player cap for the world and we are just straight up given a server that is the same cap as publics (80 players). The different prices for dedicated/cloud also depends on if they are going to use a dedicated host (like Nitrado) or a cloud host (like AWS).
More Details:
Server hosting has two really big factors: are you going dedicated vs. cloud and how much resources do you need.
Dedicated hosts also come in two varieties. Managed hosts and unmanaged hosts. Traditionally, when you talk about āgame serversā you are usually talking about managed dedicated hosts. Examples include things like Minecraft Realms, Nitrado, CreeperHost, etc. Single purpose managed hosts (like for game servers) can be pretty cheap. The reason is the all of the software is already built and put together to specifically manage that game. Multi-purpose managed hosts can be pretty expensive. The can get into cloud costs (more on that later). Unmanaged dedicated hosts (examples: OVH, SoYouStart) can be pretty cheap as well. The reason being is because there is no software/support provided to the buyer; they are just server sitting somewhere connected to the Internet and you have to do the rest. As a result unmanaged hosts also require some expert knowledge to use.
The devs partnering with a single purpose managed host āgame serverā company like Nitrado or using an unmanaged hosts seem like very likely options here. A single purpose managed host would lead to the lowest possible prices (the $10/month for 10 people and then $1-2/month more per person). Unmanaged hosts will likely lead to the lower end of the āfixedā prices of $50/month. Minecraft and ARK: Survival Evolved are two games that are great examples that use this approach. These games also have cross platform player owned servers as well. I am not a game dev and I do not know what the devs financials look like, but this is definitely the direct I would go in for player owned servers to reduce the costs to end user.
Sources:
https://server.nitrado.net/usa/order-gameserver/2
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/realms-for-java/plans
https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/
Cloud hosts are where the prices really start to go up fast. They are similar to how a multi-purpose managed dedicated host would be. The issue here is that it is 100% managed for any possible use case. For cloud, you literally pay by the second that the server is running. In return, you get wonderfully great developer friendly APIs that let you bring up servers at the drop of a hat and you never have to worry about data loss (outside of developer error). The nice thing about cloud is for the lower ends, you can still get those nice cheap prices (~$10/month for ~8 players), but it is going to scale up at a much more expensive rate (~$5/month per 2 players) resulting in the ~$150/month (or more!) for a full fledged game server. This prices can be reduced greatly via reservations (promising this server will run for X amount of time), but those are really hard to for player subscription based stuff since reservations are usually in increments of a year at a time.
Cloud hosts still seem like a very likely option because it seems like that is what all of the existing gameservers use (you can do a whois on an IP address of a game server and see the IP is owned by Amazon). Also, AWS is very popular amount developers. An example of another game that does this for āplayer owned serversā is Fallout 76.
Sources:
https://calculator.aws/#/estimate?id=a402e9208f57621d9b10aebb6bd5333434b691f8
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I believe most things are on cloud servers now (not 100% sure) and since the rental planets will be part of the main Universe, I assume those will also be on them (again, not certain). I think Ross or Luca recently said they bought new hardwareā¦so they might be adding some dedicated servers, or it could just be upgrades for their own use.
It may not be an issue now, but in the future, we may need the ability to cap the # of players/visitors on our rentals so we donāt exceed our data allotmentā¦or add some type of optional scalable/proxy plan. ie: if I exceed my planās usage, I would automatically be charged $5 for an extra GB or two. If I held a party, I def wouldnāt want people to lose access in the middle of it (which has happened to me before in other games - had over 400 people show up to one & the thing practically froze lol)
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Are each of the current planets on a single server? I keep imagining there are 3-4 on a single server for some reason.
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Based on the DNS names they appear to be sharing servers.
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I think we should use coin from the game
Rental planets have to cost irl $ because it costs Boundless irl $ & resources to provide them to us. And itās not a one time thingā¦itās on-going.
Maybe they could offer GC for an ton of coin like some games do. (Takes quite awhile to grind for it though)
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Iād think that would need to be in the tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of coin per month for GC if that were to be the case, given how easily some people make money from malls and whatnot.
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Yeah, it would need to be A LOT lol
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