Hello Karel, I host 3 browser games on App Engine. Neptune's Pride, Blight of the Immortals and my new one Jupiter's Folly.
My oldest and largest game Neptune's Pride has about 2000 Daily active users, and about 7000 visits a day according to Google Analytics. My games are flash, so they don't heaps of "page views", but the flash makes 100-150k requests a day. At times I have been much bigger and the data-store easily handles the load. Even though there has been a lot of hoopla here about the price increases, I would still recommend app engine to a small operation who want to get on with the business of making games rather than managing servers. My bill is going from about 50c a day to about $3 a day. About $1000 a year. Before the price increase my hosting was easily covered by the little bit of advertising I have on the game (which players don't see unless they have been playing 7 days without becoming a paying player). After the price increase my ads will probably only cover 2/3s of my hosting costs. My biggest expense is datastore writes. Because the games are interactive, not simply passive pages to view, the players make a lot of changes to their data which needs to be written to the datastore. Those 2k players of Neptune's Pride generate about 2 Million writes which is $2 of my $3 a day bill. Feel free to shoot me any other questions you might have, just keep in mind I'm no expert! ;) Jay. On Sep 13, 2:32 am, Karel Crombecq <karel.cromb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hey guys, > > I am currently evaluating different possibilities for making a sequel to a > very popular text-based browser game called Castle Quest 2 > (http://www.castlequest.be). The original game was written in php, with > MySQL as the backend. I am investigating different hosting options for > making a state-of-the-art, html5-based sequel to this game. > > CQ2 is extremely demanding from a server perspective. About 1500 active > users cause on average 3 million page views each day (90 million each > month), for a bandwidth usage of 2,5GB per month. About 250 SQL queries are > executed each second, and the database is slightly less than 1 GB large, > with hundreds of tables. It is expected that, with the advent of social > networks and social games, the player base will grow substantially, and the > numbers for CQ3 will be multiples of those for CQ2. > > Is GWT and app engine with the data store a viable platform for a game with > these specifications? Will the datastore be able to deal with the pressure? > I can't find any data about big apps hosted on app engine, so it is hard for > me to get an idea of the scale of some apps that are hosted on app engine. > The main alternative (Amazon EC2) has proven to be able to deal with this > kind of pressure and much more (Farmville is hosted on it) but google app > engine has lots of advantages over Amazon EC2, such as the servlet > architecture, easy transparent scaling and integration with GWT, so I'm > definitely leaning towards app engine if it can handle it. > > Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks in advance, > Kind regards, > Karel Crombecq -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
