That’s how I ended up buying a PS3 back when GTA V was released. Well, that and Gran Turismo and wanting a Blu-ray player. But it was still not really worth it.

Typically scales fractional to the user count and often in steps. These costs stay relatively stable no matter if you have 1 or 10000 players (for example), then rise a bit to support 18000 players, etc. And they should not start out high enough to require a loan just for them.

If you build an MMO and get a sudden influx of millions on players… ok. Then maybe. But they typically also grow somewhat organically.

Each user causing you direct costs that even increase with their usage is… not optimal. But hey, it’s worth a shot, I guess.

If the game uses the Steam SDK, they “of course” can at least check that the request comes from an authorized game (SSO via Steam). But sure, people who bought the game can still easily troll the dev, unless they also employ some kind of anti-cheat system. But from what it sounds like even then a troll could simply play the game excessively and then ramp up costs for the dev.

Only if the client is making the requests directly. If your own infrastructure is in between (which it should), you can limit the kind of requests and their rate at will.

Of course that’s an architecture I am not sure someone who develops something like this has on their mind.

But loans don’t scale with the amount of players and played hours. They typically purely factor into the cost of development and support.

Actually sounds like the perfect use case for a model like Jev. I think Jevos should be able to handle that locally.

I liked it gameplay wise, but the story … urgh. Typical comic book villain tropes. Taunting you with how awesome and cunning they are, just to vanish and leave you with one of their henchmen that you then slaughter. Repeat a few times, until they finally pretend to be really pissed off now and decide to spill their whole plan and why you have no chance of stopping them … just to be stopped.

The only thing the villains in D3 had was arrogance. Everything else was forgettable (to me).