Worldwide console sales thread

[RedRedSuit]

I know how much, roughly, it costs to run the multiplayer part of it, because the technical facts of it are undeniable. 99.99999% of the traffic is p2p, and the rest of it is easy to estimate, which is what I've done in depth in the past. So yes, I do know what I'm talking about there. You can file it under anything you want, of course.

Running the rest of it is a different story, but I didn't speculate on that part of it.

[Indy_aka_Rex]

You're not really arguing anything I'm saying, RRS doesn't know how much it costs for MS to run XBL. He is just engaging in more knowledgeable speculation, but its still speculation.

No matter what it is... the fact of the matter is, if a small company with less experience, significantly less money and lacking the pull MS has can run servers that provide thousands if not millions of people online support without taking a massive budget-draining hit and without charging its customers? MS is more than likely running Live's "multiplayer" without taking any financial hit whatsoever... moreso thanks to the fact that, the big 3 publishers (EA, Ubi and Activision) all provide their own servers, and Live is primarily P2P.

[coldfoot]

I read it on here.

You've read wrong.

No one said it costs nothing for MS to run Xbox live, the argument is it costs practically nothing for MS for online multiplayer.

Let's look at that 1 billion number. First of all, that's divided roughly half and half between subs and sales. So XBL brings 500M on game/movie sales/rentals. Guess what, a big part of that is paid to movie studios, and game developers, aka the content owners.

The other part is subscriptions. As I said before, online mp is p2p and costs very little for MS to have presence servers, since very little bandwidth is used. Other costs are for the programmers who develop new services, and also for the bandwidth used for all those demo downloads etc. Not to mention that from a $50 (now $60) live card sold at the grocery store, about $30-35 goes to MS and the other is retailer profit.

Not to mention XBL is available in fewer countries than PSN, and majority of their traffic is US only, so they save some money there.

[Almril]

No matter what it is... the fact of the matter is, if a small company with less experience, significantly less money and lacking the pull MS has can run servers that provide thousands if not millions of people online support without taking a massive budget-draining hit and without charging its customers? MS is more than likely running Live's "multiplayer" without taking any financial hit whatsoever... moreso thanks to the fact that, the big 3 publishers (EA, Ubi and Activision) all provide their own servers, and Live is primarily P2P.

That would be applicable if Valve was selling loss-leading hardware and had any kind of consumer electronic presence. And even then, we don't know how much of a cut Valve gets on each sale, or any of the advertising, or profit-sharing or any of that kind of thing. All I'm saying is that without hard numbers, its pointless to pontificate about these things, there is too much going on behind the scenes.

[RedRedSuit]

...So apparently the article where Kaz said this was actually referring to the entire Sony Online services: PSN + video + eBooks + QRIOCITY + etc., and that his explanation for the red ink is the startup costs of spinning up all these new services recently.

[chipvideo]

How many people are paying for PSN+? 100K?

[BBM128]

That would be applicable if Valve was selling loss-leading hardware and had any kind of consumer electronic presence. And even then, we don't know how much of a cut Valve gets on each sale, or any of the advertising, or profit-sharing or any of that kind of thing. All I'm saying is that without hard numbers, its pointless to pontificate about these things, there is too much going on behind the scenes.

It is valid to speculate this, though. Microsoft is charging up to as much as a full game (up-front, not in installments) for their service. We know PS+ is mostly profit for Sony, but I'm sure you'll not argue that for obvious reasons. The same could very well be said for Live since most of the traffic is between users. Peer-to-peer. Obviously there is a cost to Microsoft for Live but it most certainly isn't that high. Invites, in-game dashboard, voice chat, those are all factually functions of the OS and do not bring up appreciable costs to Microsoft, if any at all. The feature set is simply locked to people that don't pay.

It would be interesting to see what those numbers are, but I don't think a single person should be surprised to see on overall low cost of service to Microsoft being offset (easily) by what they bring in on subscriptions of any tier. (You know, in the event they released such numbers.)

[BBM128]

How many people are paying for PSN+? 100K?

Probably more than that. That'd be a disgustingly low number (given the userbase), even for a service that was not expected by anyone (reasonable) to tear up the sales charts. I bet anything it's far far higher than 100k, but much lower than the 13 million that pay for Live.

Either way, like Live, it is very possible that PS+ is mostly free money for the service provider.

[Almril]

It is valid to speculate this, though. Microsoft is charging up to as much as a full game (up-front, not in installments) for their service. We know PS+ is mostly profit for Sony, but I'm sure you'll not argue that for obvious reasons. The same could very well be said for Live since most of the traffic is between users. Peer-to-peer. Obviously there is a cost to Microsoft for Live but it most certainly isn't that high. Invites, in-game dashboard, voice chat, those are all factually functions of the OS and do not bring up appreciable costs to Microsoft, if any at all. The feature set is simply locked to people that don't pay.

It would be interesting to see what those numbers are, but I don't think a single person should be surprised to see on overall low cost of service to Microsoft being offset (easily) by what they bring in on subscriptions of any tier. (You know, in the event they released such numbers.)

Yeah, but whats the point of the speculation without any hard numbers. I'd love to know how the competing business models are working out. Otherwise, we just go into the moral zone about MS being greedy scheming taxers and Sony the altruistic martyr up on the cross for the hardcore gamer, and that ground is well worn.

[BBM128]

Yeah, but whats the point of the speculation without any hard numbers. I'd love to know how the competing business models are working out. Otherwise, we just go into the moral zone about MS being greedy scheming taxers and Sony the altruistic martyr up on the cross for the hardcore gamer, and that ground is well worn.

The point is that if you are charged for a service, you should have an understanding of not only what you're being charged for, but why. I already said that PS+, itself, is just like Live in that it's essentially free money for Sony just like Live very likely is for Microsoft. We have room for logical speculation because there are things we know about Live. Things that are, factually, relevant and aid the speculation that lead to a logical conclusion. The biggest is the fact that most games on Live are played peer-to-peer.

[Van]

XBox 360 beats PS3 in the UK in 2010:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=281937


Total sales of console games came in at £1.45 billion, with Xbox 360 and PS3 showing growth over 2009. Xbox 360 games generated £538 million and PS3 titles £414 million. In terms of units sold, 18.2 million Xbox 360 games were snapped up, versus 13.8 million PS3 titles.

The total revenue for console hardware sales amounted to £800 million, headed by Xbox 360 with £232 million and followed by PS3 with £229 million. Combined hardware sales of the two platforms totalled 2.3 million units.

[KageMaru]

I know how much, roughly, it costs to run the multiplayer part of it, because the technical facts of it are undeniable. 99.99999% of the traffic is p2p, and the rest of it is easy to estimate, which is what I've done in depth in the past. So yes, I do know what I'm talking about there. You can file it under anything you want, of course.

Running the rest of it is a different story, but I didn't speculate on that part of it.

Of all the things I know very well concerning video games, networking is largely my weakest area, so I was wondering if you can help me understand something.

I was told that traditional p2p is set up like this:



While p2p games that run on 360, ps3, etc. are set up shown below with one player acting as host while the rest are clients:



I was also told that these central servers manage data between the players. Is this all wrong?

Doesn't there have to be some server backbone since outside of EA, MS provides all of Live's servers, where if a game is online on the ps3 or Wii, the server need to be provided by the dev or publisher.

IIRC, this was the issue between EA and MS back in the xbox 1 days. MS wanted everyone to use their servers, but EA spent too much money already so they insisted on using theirs. Even when playing an EA game, you get "connecting to EA servers" when playing MP.

Speaking of which, EA is shutting down servers for another list of games, wish I knew where I saw it earlier.

[RedRedSuit]

Of all the things I know very well concerning video games, networking is largely my weakest area, so I was wondering if you can help me understand something.

I was told that traditional p2p is set up like this:



While p2p games that run on 360, ps3, etc. are set up shown below with one player acting as host while the rest are clients:



I was also told that these central servers manage data between the players. Is this all wrong?

Once the actual match starts (the fighting/etc. begins), the P2P games on 360, PS3, etc. look like the second diagram, not the first... but there should be a little monitor on the center computer. However, one of these players is chosen as the host (the center guy) -- presumably the one with the best average connectivity and bandwidth to the other players. The host is only special in that the "authoritative" game state is stored on that guy, and all the other players get the information on where everybody is, how fast they're going, who's shooting, etc., from the center guy. Hence "host advantage": the host's own game experience is smoother, since the trip to get all the info about the current game state is halved in length (other player -> server=you; instead of other player -> server -> you).

So it's a client-server model -- but one of the players' consoles is chosen as the server. Hence, it's peer-to-peer, because only peers (players) are involved in packet flow. The "peer-to-peer" name for it is a misnomer, since the model is client server; but what it's trying to say is that only player machines are involved.

A dedicated server is when the center guy in the first diagram isn't running the client part of the software; i.e., no one is playing the actual game on it -- so remove the little monitor. In PC game land, a dedicated server is usually just a normal user's PC that is purely running as a server (no one is actually playing), freeing up resources to be a better server.

Dedicated servers can also be run by individual companies, if they want to improve the player experience (i.e., have an array of machines in various parts of the world, with a lot of memory, a fat network pipe, and great connectivity). This doesn't seem common for console games. I think I've heard of Valve doing it... maybe... and also the first Resistance.

Doesn't there have to be some server backbone since outside of EA, MS provides all of Live's servers, where if a game is online on the ps3 or Wii, the server need to be provided by the dev or publisher.

There is definitely a server backbone for setting up the lobbies, matchmaking, etc. However, that is dwarfed by the traffic sent in demo downloads (gigabytes and gigabytes) and the actual gameplay traffic (which is p2p as described above).

IIRC, this was the issue between EA and MS back in the xbox 1 days. MS wanted everyone to use their servers, but EA spent too much money already so they insisted on using theirs. Even when playing an EA game, you get "connecting to EA servers" when playing MP.

Those are almost certainly lobby/matchmaking servers.

[KageMaru]

Hey thanks. I knew a lot of what you explained already (host advantage, relationship with other players, dedicated servers, etc.) so sorry, I probably should have been more clear on my question so you didn't waste your time typing out a bunch of stuff I already knew. However I was told that data still passes through a central server in these p2p games. This central server isn't providing any bandwidth, that's left for the host, but the data being sent back and forth between the host and clients still passes through it. Wrong? I guess this is the only part that I'm hazy on.

Is it just coincidence that the EA games I've played seem laggier than 1st party sony and MS games? I thought it had to do with the quality of these central servers.

[RedRedSuit]

Hey thanks. I knew a lot of what you explained already (host advantage, relationship with other players, dedicated servers, etc.) but I was told that data still passes through a central server in these p2p games. This central server isn't providing any bandwidth, that's left for the host, but the data being sent back and forth between the host and clients still passes through it. Wrong? I guess this is the only part that I'm hazy on.

No prob. If the stuff going between host and clients were to also go through a company-owned server then the company-owned server *would* have to have adequate bandwidth for that, and that would be expensive. I mean, bandwidth is not really being "provided" to other people but is just the width of the pipe at the given point. So if host gets data piece X, and the hypothetical company server gets data piece X, then the latter would have to expend just as much of its bandwidth as the former.

However, that would just be a pointless additional trip. The kind of stuff that would go to any company server would be, like, the current score, who has how many points, etc. That is tiny by comparison.

Don't get me wrong; it's not like I can see their source code, but there's just nothing to be gained by routing stuff through the company server, if a player's console is already chosen as a server and acts in that capacity.

Is it just coincidence that the EA games I've played seem laggier than 1st party sony and MS games? I thought it had to do with the quality of these central serves.

No idea. Lagginess can be a result of the quality of the networking code, for example.