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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Linden Lab, the people behind Second Life, may have made this mistake. They had leased data center space in Phoenix AZ, and owned their own machines, about 5000 of them. During 2020, the whole system was moved to AWS.

Most of the servers, each of which handles an area of the virtual world, run all the time, regardless of user load. This is very different than web serving. It's the worst cost case for AWS, where the real benefits come from dynamically provisioning a changing load. AWS, used for dedicated servers, can cost 2x that of owning your own. One data center operator says 4x.[1]

Before the conversion, I'd asked the responsible VP if they were sure AWS wasn't going to be more expensive. He retired when the conversion was complete. Now we hear rumors of the company finding out that AWS costs are higher than the old data center.

[1] http://www.happi.io/aws-instances-versus-physical-servers/

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Game servers is an especially bad fit for AWS. They often need a high single core performance for many players + high simulation tick rate. They (mostly) don't need ECC RAM or reliable storage. They do need networking optimized for latency not throughput.

Another example is EA hosting all their Battlefield servers on AWS. Can't imagine what this is costing them for subpar performance (rumor is they had to deactivate their anti-cheat system fair fight to get acceptable performance).

A bigger cost failure is Spatial OS, from Improbable. They spent about $400M of VC money to build the underpinnings of the Metaverse. You had to host your virtual world/game on Google's cloud, and there was a complicated pay-per-transaction scheme, billed to the game operator.

Three reasonably good free-to-play indy games were built on it. They all went broke within months, because the operating costs were so high. Now, as far as their website says, they have no real customers. But they have enough money left to fund three in-house game studios, in hopes of getting a hit.

They did license the technology to the NetEase unit of Tencent in China, where it was used for Nostos, a MMO with great art that a good player could finish in a few hours. It began shutdown on March 17th, 2021.

I'm interested in seeing the Metaverse of Ready Player One/Snow Crash happen. Second Life is the high water mark of that idea. Most of what's come out since has been worse. Facebook Horizon, anyone? Virtual worlds turn out to be expensive to run from a compute standpoint. Most games are able to offload much of the work to the clients, plus much of the asset processing is done once when the game world is built. Fully modifiable multiuser virtual worlds have to do much more server-side, which costs.

On the other hand, the Well, mentioned on HN today, once cost US$6/hour. For a text only social network. Compute progress marches on.

Incidentally, Linden Lab is still looking for a VP of engineering for Second Life.[1] As a user, builder, and someone coding a third party client for it, but definitely not an employee, I'd like to see them get someone good.

[1] https://www.lindenlab.com/careers?gh_jid=4448559003

I'll ask the obvious, did no one do the math on the expected difference?

Someone likely did.

They likely also retired, per the parent comment.

Someone did the math of "will this help my resume," got the answer "yes," and then dropped some numbers in a spreadsheet to convince their manager to let them do it.

I’m sure they did. But inevitably, someone “doing the math” on this will inject their own baseless assumptions when estimating the labor cost of maintaining an inventory of colocated or dedicated servers.

I might even wager that such a comment will appear as a sibling to this one within the next 30 minutes.

You lost the wager unfortunately

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