Network Egress

Network egress is the cost cloud providers charge for data leaving their network — for game servers, this is typically the largest hidden infrastructure expense and the one studios most often underestimate.

Cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) charge nothing for data entering their network (ingress) but charge per gigabyte for data leaving it (egress). For game servers this is almost always a one-sided equation: players send small inputs to the server (ingress, free) and the server sends large, frequent state updates back to all players (egress, charged). A 64-player battle royale server sending 60 game state updates per second generates substantial egress traffic — constantly, for the duration of every session.

Why egress costs surprise studios

Egress fees are easy to underestimate because they appear nowhere in the headline pricing. A cloud provider quotes you a compute instance price and a storage price. The egress charge is buried in the networking section and compounds silently as your player count grows.

A studio running 10,000 concurrent players might be paying $0.08–$0.09 per GB of egress on a major cloud provider. At that scale, egress can easily match or exceed the compute cost of the instances themselves. Studios that budget carefully for servers often discover mid-launch that their networking bill is 50–100% on top of what they planned for.

The bare-metal difference

Bare-metal infrastructure providers typically include bandwidth in a flat monthly rate rather than charging per gigabyte. A dedicated bare-metal machine might come with 10–20TB of included monthly bandwidth. For high-traffic game servers this fundamentally changes the economics — egress stops being a variable cost that scales with player count and becomes a fixed line in the budget.

This is one of the primary reasons orchestration platforms that blend bare-metal and cloud infrastructure (rather than running exclusively on cloud) can deliver substantially lower total cost at scale. You route sessions to bare-metal nodes by default and burst to cloud only when capacity requires it — keeping the majority of your egress traffic on infrastructure where bandwidth is included.

Egress and your matchmaker

Egress costs are also affected by where you place servers relative to players. A server in the wrong region doesn’t just hurt latency — it pushes traffic across more network hops, potentially crossing provider boundaries and incurring additional egress charges. Good region selection reduces both latency and bandwidth cost simultaneously.

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