I know no company would ever do this… but if you say “sorry, we weren’t expecting this much traffic, so the servers are at capacity” couldn’t you have just limited sales to some percent over your capacity? I’m not in a huge rush to play, but I was a bit annoyed when I bought the game, launched—it launched on my portrait orientation monitor, which is annoying, i watch the intro cinematic which was funny, then it stalls out on the main screen because capacity and I can’t even access game settings to try to fix the monitor thing. This has more to do with it being a console port, but like sheesh, you can’t even get to a menu if the servers are down?
Final Fantasy XIV experienced similar overloaded servers during the launch of its most recent expansion Endwalker, and they actually stopped selling the game for over a month until they had more server capacity to support the number of players.
Better to preserve a good experience for the customers you already have than cause a bad experience for everyone.
I mean that’s why I said no company would actually do this. But if they say demand was way more than expected, that means they were basing their financial assumptions off of a smaller sale amount, and stuff like server hosting/capacity was likely scaled to that smaller amount as well.
I do think there’s an ok argument for it though—you avoid a bad first impression where people are frustrated by spending money and having no product (as in the uncertainty of being able to login). And likewise, a wave launch could possibly increase the hype through anticipation like those sneaker drops and such. Would allow you to make the money you “expected” to make and then expand the server infrastructure in manageable chunks that won’t bankrupt you if there isn’t that much more demand.
That said, this wave launch would have to occur pretty quickly, otherwise the demand would move on since it couldn’t get the product for any price (like when I abandoned buying a new graphics card a while back because there literally wasn’t anything I wanted available for sale, except scalped ones on Amazon)
This game isn’t just more popular than the first one, it’s orders of magnitude more popular. First game peaked at 6000 players. I think at one point this sequel had over 400,000 people trying to get in at the same time.
I know no company would ever do this… but if you say “sorry, we weren’t expecting this much traffic, so the servers are at capacity” couldn’t you have just limited sales to some percent over your capacity? I’m not in a huge rush to play, but I was a bit annoyed when I bought the game, launched—it launched on my portrait orientation monitor, which is annoying, i watch the intro cinematic which was funny, then it stalls out on the main screen because capacity and I can’t even access game settings to try to fix the monitor thing. This has more to do with it being a console port, but like sheesh, you can’t even get to a menu if the servers are down?
If you were the developer, would you limit your sales and potentially lose out on those sales?
I would, as a matter of integrity.
Final Fantasy XIV experienced similar overloaded servers during the launch of its most recent expansion Endwalker, and they actually stopped selling the game for over a month until they had more server capacity to support the number of players.
Better to preserve a good experience for the customers you already have than cause a bad experience for everyone.
I mean that’s why I said no company would actually do this. But if they say demand was way more than expected, that means they were basing their financial assumptions off of a smaller sale amount, and stuff like server hosting/capacity was likely scaled to that smaller amount as well.
I do think there’s an ok argument for it though—you avoid a bad first impression where people are frustrated by spending money and having no product (as in the uncertainty of being able to login). And likewise, a wave launch could possibly increase the hype through anticipation like those sneaker drops and such. Would allow you to make the money you “expected” to make and then expand the server infrastructure in manageable chunks that won’t bankrupt you if there isn’t that much more demand.
That said, this wave launch would have to occur pretty quickly, otherwise the demand would move on since it couldn’t get the product for any price (like when I abandoned buying a new graphics card a while back because there literally wasn’t anything I wanted available for sale, except scalped ones on Amazon)
This game isn’t just more popular than the first one, it’s orders of magnitude more popular. First game peaked at 6000 players. I think at one point this sequel had over 400,000 people trying to get in at the same time.