I'd agree but it'd be really weird for them to erase saves that fast. Makes more sense that their storage just sets a timer for a few months.
There are any number of online services that will erase your data the second you ask or fail to pay, indeed I would probably assume it the default for most. Similarly it would be an extra step for their coders (presumably storage bods hired off the street and told to do as usual) to add such a feature to hold it in limbo.
I don't know if they are doing some kind of huge database or giant file storage. The ambiguity in the terms phrasing saying to me they might have had some kind of cleanup service/cron job they run every so often/when demand allows rather than straight instant for everybody*. In that case some might have got lucky but as they could not guarantee it would not happen.
*let's play back of the envelope server builder. I will go with UK prices as they are probably not going to get away with burying the server somewhere in the third world or India for this one. UK will be as expensive, or probably more, than the US, Canada, the rest of Europe or Japan for everything here.
http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/ reckons 20.07 million global sales. Number of games per user I don't know about.
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/game...astupdate=0&showlastupdate=1&showothersales=0 would have no game as above 10 million right now and you are at number 15 before you are below a million. Save size I am not sure about either and will probably vary a bit.
We will say 100 megs per user going by what people say around here when ripping their saves, similar games and such. For 80% attach rate to the online service that is 1500 or so terabytes.
https://www.thinkmate.com/system/stx-cl-xe72-2460 will sell me a storage server with 576 TB for about £25000 , halve it though and go full redundancy RAID. Multiply by 6 to get the storage space enough for that (it is usually easy enough to scale these things too -- storage clusters being a known concept). Somewhere around £153000 landed. 807.6 Watts a piece so nothing too outrageous on that front (it is no GPU bitcoin mining operation or anything).
Anyway each of those is 4u. 4u rack on
https://hostinguk.net/quote/coloquote (a UK colocation hosting outfit) with 5000gigs a month is £300 a month (can add unmetered connections as well for not a lot, and will probably have them for a while for data burst). We have 6 so £1800 a month. £21600 a year. £172800 if we assume the Switch lives another 8 years at the same numbers of users.
So that is hardware and running the things. A server admin (they probably have a full network team already they can expand or task but hey).
I could start adding tape backups to this I guess but this is getting silly so I will leave it there for now. It would be annoying as well for most tapes seem to be in the terabyte range and I don't know what deltas or dailies will get me here.
Anyway
https://www.indeed.co.uk/Database-Administrator-jobs has on the steep side about £50000 a year for a dbadmin (might as well have India in this as well
https://www.naukri.com/db-admin-jobs ). Assume it costs £100000 with pension contributions and whatnot (or maybe someone is a big boy server bothering type or a coder and costs a bit more) and you get 6 of them. £600000 plus the earlier stuff is £774600. We are still under a million at this point to go from nothing to this. Between hardware replacements, upgrades for more storage and all that jazz I will assume a constant of about that and most of that is salary. This is for rolling their own as well, purchasing in a service (or riding out the bumps with one). If for some reason we have to do high availability or fault tolerant (we don't -- they took their eshop down the other day and that actually makes them money) then that gets a bit higher but given it is not going to make more salary really and hardware/running costs are but a small fraction of that. Even a complete and total failure with the servers vanishing in a puff of smoke could probably be worked around without too many traumas (people just need to upload their saves again, which they will probably be doing anyway, sucks for those few that managed to lose their device in the meantime and backups might even help there).
I don't know what the ageing out rate will be either but probably not too high and new user spikes are probably nothing too drastic either (demands predictable is what I am heading for). If it is only going to be 100 megs or so (and it is not likely to be your most hardcore with dozens that do age out) then it is not an awful lot of "redundant" data to keep on your servers. If it was some multi gig per user video hosting affair then yeah it makes more sense, though for that sort of thing you probably charge an awful lot more.
Recall at this point you have some 16000000 (16 million) in this estimate paying you somewhat more than a pound each a year (cost to user is £17.99 for an annual subscription, though 20% will be tax), plus the cut from the online services (don't know what the eshop costs developers, most seem unwilling to speak out but
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-10-why-nintendo-switch-games-are-ending-up-more-expensive would indicate "not cheap" and with Apple and Google taking a double digits and then some percentage I don't imagine it is too far off that. Technically that probably should be pointed at hosting/CDN costs for the game but given things already mentioned they are not going to be that bad either) and general licensing fees.
I can almost see offering such a service for free (a million a year is nothing really for a big business like this), though it does not sting as much as them wanting to charge for online gaming which is probably even cheaper and cheaper still if they stick with p2p.
I have a question: if you upload a save to cloud, the original save gets corrupted, can you then download the non-corrupted, cloud save? I mean the corrupted save won't get uploaded and replace the good save, will it? ....unless I'm not understanding the purpose to cloud saving.
If the save has an inbuilt verification check then the corruption would have to amount to a collision there and that is not likely to happen.
Nintendo didn't say "we changed our mind" because it'd be a VERY bad marketing move. You can't let your shareholders see you as "weak". Elon Musk lost
$5.4 billion after simply saying that he was stressed. You will NEVER see any company with stocks doing this, ever. Saying that they should be "honest" about such decisions is simply ridiculous.
Isn't Mr Musk one of those face of the company type people as far as stock buying types go? Far more than the average CEO or whatnot.
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