• Aceticon@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.

    Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      4 months ago

      Web servers are different from game servers. You need a lot of performance and fast low latency servers to keep up with realtime game play. Webservers however dont need that and can benefit of load balancing accross multiple servers. Scale of economy helps a lot, but with game servers the cost doesnt change much because a session has to be on a single machine.

      As for distribution costs, most of the cost is manufacturing and physical distribution of discs. So yeah, they are making a killing by continuing to take a a huge cut from game sales when most of their distribution is online.