Blizzard is “confident” that Diablo IV’s launch servers can handle the load

Door 1: You might not have enough servers for launch. You say so, and some people decide to binge Ted Lasso that night and wait a day or two to see if their friends are having fun.

Door 2: you overpromise convincingly, and generate more traffic on launch day than if you had said nothing. So now you’re just hitting yourself.

The thing with servers failing is that doubling the users always makes them at least 2log2 times slower, so there are any number of tricks you can do to cut traffic by 15% so you can cut congestion by 17%. Nowhere on that list is opening your fat stupid gob and tempting fate.

Just because the cloud exists doesn't mean you wrote your backend in such a way that it is fully disentangled from the rest of the application, nor that it was containerized and handed off to an orchestration engine which was properly configured to scale out horizontally across dynamically provisioned nodes.

The games industry specifically has a chip on its shoulder with regards to linux and scaling as well as a general refusal to NOT poorly reinvent every wheel in C++ inside their windows-only desktop client.

Otherwise you wouldn't see goofy shit like Square Enix halting sales of their game because they couldnt scale their snowflake out to general-purpose servers