Market Research: would you pay for a dedicated ZAP! server?
by Stephen Zepp · in General Game Discussion · 12/31/2004 (3:02 am) · 8 replies
I was curious how many people out there would be interested in being able to have a hosted ZAP! server for a small fee, say in the range of $15-$25 a month?
If their is enough interest to pay the normal cost of a decent to good server, I was planning on taking the idea to my current co-location provider.
Basically, the plan I am thinking about would be that you would open up an account with the hosting provider company (fully commercial business, I'm not talking about a bunch of folks getting together and doing this themselves), each leasing a login account to a server that does only ZAP! stuff (would most likely be non-root only, and a shared domain name of some sort, but that would be up to the provider to determine).
From what I know of his pricing structure for bandwidth/platform, it would probably take 8-10 people willing to pay the higher end price, or 12-20 at the lower end price to make this feasible, so:
Would you be interested in something like this?
If their is enough interest to pay the normal cost of a decent to good server, I was planning on taking the idea to my current co-location provider.
Basically, the plan I am thinking about would be that you would open up an account with the hosting provider company (fully commercial business, I'm not talking about a bunch of folks getting together and doing this themselves), each leasing a login account to a server that does only ZAP! stuff (would most likely be non-root only, and a shared domain name of some sort, but that would be up to the provider to determine).
From what I know of his pricing structure for bandwidth/platform, it would probably take 8-10 people willing to pay the higher end price, or 12-20 at the lower end price to make this feasible, so:
Would you be interested in something like this?
#2
12/31/2004 (11:15 am)
Yeah, I'm with Adam on this. Please keep in mind though that we have not done so much as even a press release on Zap yet. Jay has not yet begun to market...literally.
#3
I'll take the idea to him and see if he can come up with what he feels are reasonable numbers for leasing a server, and go from there. And of course will keep an eye on the release schedule as well!
12/31/2004 (11:21 am)
@Adam/Pat: All the more reason really to have a reasonable package ready if/when the market is interested!I'll take the idea to him and see if he can come up with what he feels are reasonable numbers for leasing a server, and go from there. And of course will keep an eye on the release schedule as well!
#4
Well, at least aside from the grassroots stuff anyway. I've been attempting to strong arm friends into playing of course.
There's nothing wrong with getting the infrastructure set up before hand by any means. In the limited (mostly tribes) experience i have with renting servers, the bulk of companies that do it seem to price based on playerlimit. The cost per playerlimit factors in the resource demands of the game, as well as the bandwidth requirements. As far as i know, both of those are quite lower for zap than most other games ;)
12/31/2004 (1:54 pm)
I'm so glad to hear you guys haven't even begun to market yet ;)Well, at least aside from the grassroots stuff anyway. I've been attempting to strong arm friends into playing of course.
There's nothing wrong with getting the infrastructure set up before hand by any means. In the limited (mostly tribes) experience i have with renting servers, the bulk of companies that do it seem to price based on playerlimit. The cost per playerlimit factors in the resource demands of the game, as well as the bandwidth requirements. As far as i know, both of those are quite lower for zap than most other games ;)
#5
Always a good thing.
We'll see how things stack up with the Torque overhall however.
12/31/2004 (2:43 pm)
Quite? Try considerably lower :]Always a good thing.
We'll see how things stack up with the Torque overhall however.
#6
12/31/2004 (2:44 pm)
You might also consider renting server time rather than dedicating servers. Of course, that implies a better developed server e-commerce infrastructure. :)
#7
12/31/2004 (5:08 pm)
@Ben: not a bad point either--it really will be based I imagine on what type of response will be out there as to how he configured things. Since, like some have mentioned, the footprint (both server load and bandwitdh load) is so low, he should be able to fit a lot of users on one box, and might be able to work something along those lines out.
#8
That's just my opinion though. I myself am not in the market to run a server, so I'm not a good data point on the marketing graph.
01/09/2005 (9:22 pm)
I think a more appropriate price for hosting would be in the range of $10-15. Unless the game was coded horribly poorly, the amount of CPU required to run a server should be significantly less than that needed for a Counterstrike or other FPS shooter... much simpler collision detection, etc. So you could host a good 5-10 servers on a single box without slowdown.That's just my opinion though. I myself am not in the market to run a server, so I'm not a good data point on the marketing graph.
Adam Prime