Effectively, each server ticket increases your upload limit by 200 MB, permanently. I'd imagine things could add up with custom graphics and things like that, but I have no idea exactly how big the userbase is in Japan. It's definitely bigger than in the West, but I don't know by how much.
Server: 50,- $ per Month
Server for HA: 50,- $ per Month
Keeping it up to date (like 1-3h per month): 300,- $ per Month
Setup & Backup: 10h? 1000$ initial cost
On-Call: Probably not affordable for a small company.
I do get it, it sounds like a super small amount they need to pay to keep this afloat but still, you don't know how much development they put in before and how much maintenance they have after.
Assuming that keeping Servers up-running should not cost any money, is a weird assumption.
Yes i also find it very bewildering that people pay for XBox, PS4 and Nintendo but thats because i'm a generation where it was not typical at all to pay monthly for infrastructure. But i originally had unlimited gmail space, so...
Servers do cost money, but storing large amounts of data for upload and download, and keeping them backed up does not cost anywhere near that, unless you have extremely vast quantities of data.
Something I run streams ~200GB/day from a ~1.5TB (and growing) data collection that is highly replicated by the data store. It costs me less than 10USD/month.
It is also all automated - I don't need to touch it unless something goes wrong, which might be once every six months.
Thats what you pay in a private setting when you do it by yourself.
I can do from bare metal to frontend everything. That still doesn't mean that if i need to pay someone doing that, its 10$/month.
When you grow from 'i do that in my time with my ressources and i'm not paying myself anything' to 'i now have an employee and that person actually needs real money every month' you pay more then 10$/month.
30€ for game + 10 reusable upload slots (but seperatef for all kinds of nitty bitty details).
This covers most users needs.
But the game will mostly be a niche product reducing profitability. So selling more reusable upload slots to the ones which are fine with afforting it seems a good idea especially given that probably anyone can live with 10 slots.
Also giving unlimited upload space would be a liability for the company.
Be aware that I made that judgment based on this being a game.
If you look at it as a programming development environment it indeed seems very dogy.
But given the context you should see it as a game which also teaches you programming not as a programming environment.
>But given the context you should see it as a game which also teaches you programming
Yeah and they're already teaching kids to accept the need to pay some third party company permission to make their code available on a locked down heavily controlled piece of hardware, just like in real life.