How Our Gaming Business Changed After A Surge In Popularity [Update]
This is a follow up story for Indifferent Broccoli. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
My last update for Indifferent Broccoli in January was about dealing with the "Palpocalypse." The survival, crafting game Palworld became a hit, and Indifferent Broccoli's revenue tripled from new customers looking for Palworld server hosting.
Since then, much of my focus has been the opposite: dealing with the crash after the surge. My business tripled in during the Palworld craze, but has since fallen to about 2x what it was pre-Palworld. Game server hosting is not a traditional SaaS business that can automatically scale infinitely. I have "inventory," which are the bare metal machines I use to host customers' game servers.
During the surge, I had to acquire a mix of short and long-term leases on machines. Short provided flexibility, but long provided less expensive terms. Deciding on that mix was part of the challenge during the surge.
During the crash, actually spinning down the short-term machines brought another set of challenges, from writing the automation scripts to handling the communications. Fortunately, very few customers were upset by the downtime needed to migrate them. They understood the Palpocalypse was a rare event. But going into it, I was concerned I'd have a revolt.
Now that things are stable again, my next project is to pursue something I've had in the back of my head for awhile. We are going to create open source game hosting tools. It will be our way of 1) giving back to the community 2) helping people play these community games, even if they can't afford to pay monthly 3) building Indifferent Broccoli's reputation among gamers.
My ultimate hope is that people who use our free, open source tools will purchase our hosting if they decide they want a paid service in the future.
P.S. A few days before this story went live, Satisfactory launched a major update. This has been similar to the Palworld surge, and has grown my Satisfactory server hosting offering significantly.
