This can be resolved by building the data centers to cold countries like here in Finland. Servers are very good at converting electricity to heat, and the heat can be used to heat homes.
Microsoft Azure data center in Espoo is going to heat up 60% of the city’s district heating network.
Also the electricity here in Finland is one of the cleanest, like in all Nordics (hydro, wind, nuclear)
If steam is included, 12b is a joke, if just valves game rights, meaning HL and CS, then the price is not THAT stupid (still quite).
Maybe this would be the way go get HL3, it would ofc be horrible cashgrab, but HL3 would be out.
Edit: bit details, in 2021 Valve had $10b revenue from steam, and $3b revenue from other sources (heh, source, get it)
Main problem with game like this, is that you are probably not going to have it running more than 6 months with heavy loads, after that you can scale everything down.
If you have a business that is going to run 10-20 years, you can build complex solutions to optimize the cost.
In this kind of rocket like need of global computing power, the cloud is only real solution.
No one in their right mind would deploy own servers for this kind of load. It fluctuate way too much and in half a year you have unused servers that are junk. Initial purchase price would be millions, and setup would take months.
They are definately running in some cloud, and 500k/month is about what you would expect to host servers for a popular game like this in close to launch.
Same as any library/framework upgrade in code: if you don’t upgrade, you will not eventually get any new features/security updates/asset etc. If you have stopped development, then no point, but if you plan for support game for longer period, it makes sense. Also in the future if UE 7 brings something awesome, upgrade from UE5->UE7 is much harder than two simpler version upgrades.
And ofc this thing is clear scam, so this was just in general
We already know that Israeli cyber company has spyware called pegasus, that can 0-click attacks to ios and Android. It is one time hack, and it is removed on boot. They sell it as service. This is why cyber security centers recommend boot once a day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)