Japanese mobile game reveals monthly server cost of $13.6k and users must top this sum in purchases for the game to survive
Japanese publisher Visual Arts announced on July 31 that they have completed the last maintenance of their iOS/Android title Itsuwari no Alice. Along with the announcement, the company also revealed a certain detail about the game – its monthly server cost, and a condition that needs to be fulfilled in order for the game to not be shut down.
On July 15, it was announced that the game would no longer receive new content. Now, after the last maintenance on July 31, a “server cost counter” and a “paid Gold Coin counter” were introduced to the game. The “paid Gold Coin counter” had been previously announced under the mysterious name of “counter of something,” but now it has been made clear that the counter tracks how much in-game currency is being spent, going up when players spend their Gold Coins. The game will apparently continue to operate under the condition that the Gold Coin counter does not drop below the server cost counter, in other words, for as long as sales of the in-game currency can cover operational costs. (Related Article).
The Itsuwari no Alice management team publicly revealed the game’s operational cost for August on Twitter. This sum includes the cloud server, server maintenance, chat system and customer support expenses.
The (most likely) final maintenance is over! I’m honored to have worked on content for the game for the past four years alongside all of you! There will continue to be staff tweets on an irregular basis. Thank you for your continued support! (By the way, the cost of the server is 1,956,331 yen)
The total server cost for August was revealed to be a hefty sum of 1,956,331 yen (about $13,600), with the main expense being the cloud server fee of about $7600. It’s quite unprecedented for such costs to be revealed so openly, but it’s interesting to get a sense of how much it costs to run the game. Also, while they disclosed the necessary server costs, they did not disclose the number of active users or sales to date, which makes it difficult to judge how hard this condition is to meet.
Additionally, as of the July 31 maintenance, a “fundraising store” has been introduced into the game. This is a store where users can support the management team by spending their Gold Coins on items such as “fried chicken for the staff’s team dinner” and “expansions of the team members’ work desks”. This could be a noble way for players to spend currency left over after doing gacha. The fundraising seems to be successful so far, with the staff having already received 339425 portions of imaginary friend chicken (=339425 yen).
Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-08-01 00:52 JST)
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