[flohofwoe]

I think the article left one important reason out: you always only hear about game launches that go bad, never about the ones that go smoothly.

Also: a game launch is like an explosion going off, lots of pressure on the first day. Marketing usually wants to concentrate everything on that one single launch event. Demand on launch day and the 2..3 days after can easily be 100x to 1000x higher than in the second week. You now have the decision to somehow spin up many times the backend infrastructure that you normally need, with the associated cost (theoretically achievable with a cloud service, but see below), even if it is technically possible to smoothly scale up against millions of players wanting to login simultaneously somebody needs to take the cost hit, this is usually when the finger-pointing between management and tech begins. Sometimes it's easier to 'wait it out', since the storm will be over after a few hours.

As for cloud services: Most game-servers have soft-realtime requirements which many cloud providers can't provide (at least with the cheap cost plans). For a web server running at a cloud provider it isn't much of a problem if you have 250ms load spikes or delays from time to time, for an action game it is catastrophic.

And finally: players that can't login will spend the time raging on the internet. If you can't get your iOS update on day 1: well, shrug, I'll try again tomorrow :)