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?