Egress fees
Egress fees are charges cloud providers apply to data transferred out of their network. AWS, GCP, and Azure charge $0.09–$0.12 per GB for data egress. For multiplayer games, this cost compounds directly with player count and session frequency.
Why egress fees hit game servers hard
A multiplayer game server continuously streams state updates to every connected player. A 10-player match at 60 Hz generates roughly 2-5 GB of outbound data per hour. At $0.09/GB, that’s $0.18–$0.45 per server-hour just in bandwidth — on top of compute costs.
At scale, egress typically represents 40–60% of a multiplayer game’s total infrastructure bill. A game with 50,000 CCU can spend $20,000–$50,000/month on egress alone.
How to avoid egress fees
Bare metal providers and some game server platforms include bandwidth in the compute price. There is no separate per-GB charge. This is why studios running on cloud-only platforms often see their infrastructure bill double or triple as player count grows — compute scales linearly, but egress scales with both players and data rate.
When evaluating game server hosting, always ask: is bandwidth included, or is it billed per GB?