Server costs? Is someone uploading gigabytes of code?
I do get it, it sounds like a super small amount they need to pay to keep this afloat but still, you don't know how much development they put in before and how much maintenance they have after.
Assuming that keeping Servers up-running should not cost any money, is a weird assumption.
Yes i also find it very bewildering that people pay for XBox, PS4 and Nintendo but thats because i'm a generation where it was not typical at all to pay monthly for infrastructure. But i originally had unlimited gmail space, so...
Good infrastructure costs money.
Servers do cost money, but storing large amounts of data for upload and download, and keeping them backed up does not cost anywhere near that, unless you have extremely vast quantities of data.
Something I run streams ~200GB/day from a ~1.5TB (and growing) data collection that is highly replicated by the data store. It costs me less than 10USD/month.
It is also all automated - I don't need to touch it unless something goes wrong, which might be once every six months.
I can do from bare metal to frontend everything. That still doesn't mean that if i need to pay someone doing that, its 10$/month.
When you grow from 'i do that in my time with my ressources and i'm not paying myself anything' to 'i now have an employee and that person actually needs real money every month' you pay more then 10$/month.
The idea:
30€ for game + 10 reusable upload slots (but seperatef for all kinds of nitty bitty details).
This covers most users needs.
But the game will mostly be a niche product reducing profitability. So selling more reusable upload slots to the ones which are fine with afforting it seems a good idea especially given that probably anyone can live with 10 slots.
Also giving unlimited upload space would be a liability for the company.
Be aware that I made that judgment based on this being a game.
If you look at it as a programming development environment it indeed seems very dogy.
But given the context you should see it as a game which also teaches you programming not as a programming environment.
Yeah and they're already teaching kids to accept the need to pay some third party company permission to make their code available on a locked down heavily controlled piece of hardware, just like in real life.
I honestly wouldn't recommend this for learning/teaching/introducing programming.
Not just because if the looked down aspect.