Forum General Pricing models for data heavy games

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Pricing models for data heavy games

Postby jasonredhawk » September 28th, 2020, 3:17 pm

Hey all, I've got a weird question and perhaps too difficult to properly answer but here goes anyway!

I'm building a wildland firefighting game that uses GIS data to build maps of real locations. I've mapped out all of California and saved all that GIS data into PlayerIO's database. There are 28,000 DatabaseObjects, each about 70kb, for a total of about 1.6Gigs of GIS map data.

Now the game is designed to download only small parts of the map at a time and once downloaded, a copy is also saved to the user's device. This way it's only downloaded once but as users explore the California map, they will eventually download all 1.6Gigs. Though the game data is saved to the user's device when browsing around the map, each game started will also query the database to load the map data on the server. A typical map will use approx 2MB to 5MB of web traffic just to load the map into server memory.

I'm concerned about the scaling of this game. 1.6Gigs would cost me about $1/user according to PlayerIO plans. I was planning to make the game free to play with the option to purchase "full access" of the California map (plus other in-app purchases). Free users would be limited to the number of maps they could load in one day.

Basically, I'm trying to figure out a good financial plan such that once I release the game that I don't pay a fortune in WebTraffic because free users are using too much data by downloading too many GIS map DatabaseObjects.

Here are a couple of links to the current development progress of my game to get a better understanding of the scale of the game I'm building. It's on a scale like never before, you'll see what I mean if you watch the video below.

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/firejumpers/
Recent YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4incxlXdS94

My question is how do I not lose money building a game that requires a lot of web traffic to play and still make it available for free users?
jasonredhawk
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Re: Pricing models for data heavy games

Postby Henrik » October 13th, 2020, 10:17 pm

It sounds like GameFS is a better match for data storage, because I assume this data won't change very often? That will make it faster and cheaper for the clients to load it as well.
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Re: Pricing models for data heavy games

Postby jasonredhawk » October 16th, 2020, 1:26 pm

Thanks Henrik for your reply.

I haven't read up GameFS until just now. That could work well for my needs. Just to clarify, using GameFS to store and retrieve my map files won't use up my monthly Game Traffic data?

If that's the case, that's great news! This way I can offer my free users the ability to load anything in California without worrying that I would be paying a lot for Game Traffic.
jasonredhawk
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Re: Pricing models for data heavy games

Postby Henrik » October 18th, 2020, 11:21 am

That kind of data goes under "GameFS File Storage" and "GameFS File Traffic", but since it's *much* easier to store and serve static files than BigDB data from our database servers, it's also much cheaper. Still not free, though! :D

https://playerio.com/pricing/

Alternatively, you could use some other CDN service, for example Amazon S3 + Cloudfront to host and serve your static data. It might be cheaper for you, but you'll lose out on the nicer integration GameFS has in the client library, and if you ever update your GIS files you have to handle that yourself as well.
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Re: Pricing models for data heavy games

Postby jasonredhawk » October 22nd, 2020, 1:42 pm

Thanks Henrik, GameFS traffic is 3 times more affordable than BigDB traffic and will work perfectly for my game. Awesome!
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