[throwaway110]

Thank you! Our goal is to provide a smooth and customized multiplayer experience. Although we want to keep prices low, quality always trumps quantity in our price making. So lets look at their pricing and make a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 100 slots for $10 => $0.1 per slot per month. Based on our observations a reasonable minimum RAM usage per slot is 250MB. Thus, in this deal you pay $0.1 for 250MB RAM or $10 for 25GB RAM for a whole month. Well...this does not seem right. Why, you ask? Simple, the cheapest AWS instance with only 16GB RAM (r5.large)[0] costs $109/month. To put this again into perspective: you wont be able to serve 100 players on an AWS instance which is 11x as expensive and only has 65% of the minimum capacity. On top of that r5.large is optimized for memory not CPU, so you would end up with a way more expensive AWS instance to serve 100 players.

Then how can they offer such a deal? Again it's, simple, the quality will suffer dramatically. You will lose connections, lose game states and have low FPS. (You can find plenty honest reviews stating this).

Having said that, we aim for customers who are willing to pay a fair price for an awesome game experience. Our current price is $9.99/4 players/month which translates to $2.5/player/month. Seems fair to me...

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/

[throwaway110111]

Isn't it possible they are not using AWS? There are plenty of game hosting services that own their own hardware.

Even if they are using AWS (which personally seems like a poor decision for this kind of use case), I don't think your pricing comparison is fair. On demand pricing is the most expensive way to rent AWS servers. Reserved instances, dedicated hosts, and savings plans can cut the cost you quoted by ~70%. By your calculations that's 100 players for ~$33/month.

[throwaway110]

Yes, it is possible that they do not use AWS, but thats not my point. If you can offer a price which is a fraction of AWS' price (or for that matter of any other major cloud provider), why bother with gaming? Just sell your capacity 11x cheaper, whereas this is a lower bound for this factor. They should be able to sell it for even less.

Owning hardware does not make it necessarily cheaper. Most often to the contrary.

So by your approximation they still make -$23/month?

Either way, we offer a solid Factorio Server Hosting Service, where you do not have to bother with capacity limitations, resulting lags or an awful configuration panel. We solve this problems and we offer it for $2.5/player/month. If you want a smooth gaming experience when coming home from a stressful workday, we are the right choice. If you dont care for about the aspects mentioned above and you want to pay a few cents less per month, you should probably us a different game server host.

Our focus is quality of service.