Multiplayer Server Costs: Can You Afford a Smaller Audience?

A multiplayer game can still matter to its players after it stops attracting a large audience. Friends return for their weekly session. A small competitive scene keeps organising matches. A community continues building a world it has spent months creating.

For the studio, those sessions still carry a cost.

That tension surfaced again in late August. In reporting published on 31 August, PC Gamer covered 1047 Games’ announcement that revenue from Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded could no longer sustain their dedicated-server costs. The announced transition would end dedicated servers and matchmaking on 3 September while retaining peer-to-peer play. Read the coverage of the studio’s announcement.

That announcement does not reveal the games’ complete operating budgets. It does, however, raise a useful question for any studio building multiplayer: what happens if people keep playing, but fewer than your business plan expected?

The answer starts with understanding what your game needs to keep running at a smaller scale.

Find the cost of keeping the game available

Concurrent player counts are useful for estimating demand. They do not describe everything you must pay for.

A game may need authentication, a server list, matchmaking, player data, monitoring and support even during its quietest hours. Persistent worlds may require storage and backups while no one is connected. A small studio must also account for the developer who stops working on the next update to investigate an incident.

Separate the budget into costs that follow activity and costs that remain when activity falls. Then ask which of those apparently fixed costs are genuinely required, and which are simply settings nobody has revisited since launch.

Perhaps every region still keeps several empty servers ready. Perhaps a temporary testing environment is running continuously. Perhaps logs are retained indefinitely without a clear purpose.

The aim is to establish your minimum viable service: the smallest setup that still delivers the experience you have promised, with the recovery and support it needs. That becomes a more useful planning baseline than the largest fleet you might someday require.

Measure the cost of the sessions you actually deliver

A monthly hosting bill becomes more informative when you relate it to real play.

One useful measure is infrastructure cost per player-hour: the infrastructure spend for a period divided by the combined hours players spent in sessions during that period. Be consistent about what the spend includes. Track support and engineering time separately, or include them explicitly in a broader operating-cost measure.

Consider a deliberately simplified example. A studio has $600 of monthly baseline infrastructure costs before activity-related charges. At 6,000 player-hours, that baseline contributes $0.10 per player-hour. At 1,500 player-hours, it contributes $0.40. These are illustrative figures, not a hosting quote or an industry benchmark.

The baseline bill has stayed the same, but each hour of play now carries four times as much of it.

Review that measure alongside session occupancy, revenue and the budget available for ongoing support. A one-time purchase does not automatically fund an unlimited number of future online sessions. The studio needs an explicit plan for how continuing service is financed.

Make scaling down part of the design

Autoscaling conversations often begin with sudden popularity. Smaller audiences make the other direction equally important.

For a match-based game, review how many servers must be ready immediately, how long a new server takes to become joinable, and what delay players will tolerate. A small reserve can protect the joining experience. An oversized reserve can become a permanent charge for demand that never arrives.

Scaling down must also respect live sessions. Stop allocating new matches to capacity you intend to retire, let existing sessions finish, and preserve anything that must survive the process. Agones’ documentation illustrates why the distinction matters: its packed scheduling approach removes ready servers to free nodes, while taking account of disruption during gameplay. See Agones’ scheduling and autoscaling documentation.

Persistent worlds need their own policy. An empty world may still be expected to simulate activity, remain immediately available or accept players without a restart delay. If your game supports pausing it, test saving, restoring and reconnecting before treating that as a cost-saving option.

Finally, check the bill. Stopping a game process does not necessarily remove charges for an underlying machine, reserved capacity, storage or other services. Your deployment behaviour and your commercial terms both determine the savings.

Choose regional coverage around the remaining players

A global player count can hide several very small local communities.

Splitting those players across regions, modes, skill brackets and incompatible versions creates more separate groups to serve. Each group may need available capacity, while the people within it have fewer potential teammates or opponents.

Review where sessions actually happen, when they happen and how long players wait. Look at the latency and connection quality those players experience before changing regional coverage. One affordable location is not a useful solution if a meaningful part of your audience can no longer play comfortably.

Possible adjustments include smaller reserves in quiet regions, fewer simultaneous playlists, scheduled community events or region choices that make the trade-offs visible to players. Treat these as options to test with your community.

Define what would justify adding capacity back. A lower-cost operating plan should still give the studio a clear way to respond when an update, promotion or community event brings people back.

Decide what community hosting could support

Official dedicated servers, community-operated dedicated servers and player-hosted sessions distribute responsibility differently.

Community hosting may suit games built around persistent worlds, private groups or custom rules. But a usable offering requires more than a server executable. Operators need deployment instructions, configuration controls, a way to update safely, and clarity about saves, moderation and compatibility.

Players also need to find and join those servers. Valve’s Steamworks documentation supports both studio-operated and community-hosted dedicated servers, including distribution of dedicated-server tools. That is a practical option for compatible games, rather than something every studio must invent from scratch. Read Steamworks’ game-server documentation.

Player-hosted sessions introduce different questions around authority, host departure, connectivity and progression. Changing an existing game to use them can require substantial development work. The model should fit the game’s rules and the expectations of its players.

For either approach, map the remaining central dependencies. A community may be able to run the simulation but still depend on your account system or session service to get into a game. Long-term playability needs a plan for those services too.

Set review points before the budget becomes urgent

A smaller audience becomes easier to support when the team already knows what it will review and who makes the decisions.

Agree on a handful of signals: recurring spend, cost per player-hour, session occupancy, joining success, waiting times and the hours spent maintaining the service. Review trends over a meaningful period instead of changing the setup after one quiet evening.

Then connect those signals to specific actions. Persistently empty reserves might trigger a capacity review. A region with few matches might prompt a community conversation. A growing support burden might justify automating updates or simplifying deployment.

Document the experience that must survive each change. Players should still be able to recover their worlds, understand where to join and get a clear explanation when availability changes. Backups, tested recovery and a named owner for incidents remain important at a smaller scale.

This turns a vague instruction to reduce costs into a set of decisions the studio can assess before it is under pressure.

Build for the audience your game can sustain

Infrastructure cannot create demand or replace a viable business model. It can give a studio more control over the cost of serving the people who continue to play.

PingCore’s studio platform brings together game-server fleet scaling, regional deployment, health monitoring and API-based management. These capabilities give teams practical ways to review capacity and automate routine operations as their needs change.

Usage-based pricing helps connect resource spending to the infrastructure you provision. The important planning step is to establish which resources you need to retain, which can be released, and what each decision means for players.

For games that use server browsers, PingCore Discovery provides a live server list that can include servers hosted on PingCore or elsewhere. That gives studios flexibility when considering a mixture of official and community-operated infrastructure.

If you are building multiplayer or reviewing an existing setup, apply for PingCore’s free infrastructure audit. We can discuss your server requirements, costs, regions, persistence and scaling assumptions, including what your game would need with a smaller audience.

The players who keep returning deserve a service your studio has a realistic plan to support.