Server authority and the cost per concurrent player

The more server-side needs of your game, the heavier this server instance needs to be, and thus, the higher the cost per player of your game. For example, a famous game with cars still uses a relatively lightweight instance, but already has more logic added to it than the NAT punch-through model I described before.

Shooters were the reason server instances were created in game hosting at all, think of Unreal Tournament 99, Starsiege Tribes, Counter-Strike, Quake etc; The reason for that is that you want your server to verify and be in control over who shoots and moves where. You also want it to control who gets hit and who does not. If the server is working on hitbox calculations, map data, positioning, it starts to become quite a process.

Now imagine you’re not dealing with a 4 vs 4, or 8 vs 8, but 64 vs 64 or 99 player battle royale maps; this should make clear what it does with the requirements of the server application. The heaviest server builds we’ve seen are games that are MMO-Like games with stored/shared progression, lots of loot drops, very large maps with many players’ interactions in the same area. This results in a lot of server-side processing and as a result, requires dedicated hardware setups.

These games are an example where the focus has been on server authority; we don’t trust the client for the majority of things because it impacts player experience, cheating, gameplay, and thus impacts revenue, while also costing more to host later on.

However, you should also ask the question ‘Do we really need this to be server-side verified?’ and “Isn’t there a smarter way to do this or to use fewer resources?” with every game feature. This way you can ensure your hosting costs don’t go over the top compared to your planned income.