I think you may be missing the point. This has nothing to do with a hosting company’s capabilities but it is more about a business decision not to let cost run wild while not monetizing free to play clients.

I know a little about GNi (why I posted here) so I do know they have large farms of server sand host a ton of games. But that is immaterial to the business decision to use them.

Again, I totally agree with Marty of id here. Launching a free to play game requires some very serious controls to prevent spending from killing a product while balancing quality for players.

I’m not knocking you for your post, it does appear that capacity was the problem before you hear from id directly that is was more a choice not to get too big too fast.

I think since this initial post though, that has changed, queues are all but gone and the only down time I have seen playing is for scheduled maintenance lately.

Still, that many players is impressive and I think id has a shot at doing something very cool here.

I was imagining that GNi had farms that they could turn on and off (like the Content Delivery Networks do). If they charge for availability, not jsut usage, then the outages make much more sense.

“You don’t want to significantly over-purchase/lease the hardware (as it’s extremely expensive – particularly for a free title), but you want “enough” and a solution that is scalable. All that said, being able to support every person that wants to play is our top priority and we are working on solving this on all fronts – hardware, software, and db – as well as scalability and optimizations.”

From Marty Stratton directly…

http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/02/26/interview-ids-marty-stratton-chats-about-quake-lives-beta-lau/

It is easy to assume, hardware fails, software failes, etc… but in many cases it just doesn’t make good business sense to let a free to play game go too wild before having a way to monitize that interest.

My opinion (from reading the interview from id) is that this was a smart call as there is a need to monitize in small steps before growing a free to play game to big. This is not a PC title where you get $49 up front and thus no income with 100% expense and with expense greater than budgeted for… well you have to make some choices I think.

Anyway, this is kind of old news now… but thought I’d chime in give my $0.02

So while I’m sure you’re right that in the short term they will get more hosting revenue, in the long term other developers and publishers might think twice about going with them.

Of course, GNi can argue that they have “learned from their mistakes”.

I think the most interesting thing here is that having large queues on launch day and (so far) only one major crash is quite an achievement for an online game that is so obviously meeting and far exceeding its player volume targets. That id (who, let’s remember, has zero experience in web-based MMO type technology) has managed to launch such a tecnically ambitious project so smoothly is really quite something – your average 360 AAA release doesn’t come anywhere near it.

The game itself is sound as well, though sadly I seem to suck at it even more now than I did ten years ago.