[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Cohen:
Blizzard can allow such a big server because it really hosts only the chatrooms and the ladder games.
Other games (those created by user) are hosted by the user creating them, and battlenet is only a sort of proxy that filters all the infos.

No, Cohen - the Realm games -are- hosted on their servers, in an attempt to minimize cheating.

But Blizzard sells millions of copies, and has 10s or 100s of thousands of people on their servers, meaning that people come to them to advertise, and offer decent money for the advertising.

How many copies of Dominions 2 have been sold? Less than 10,000, I believe. Meaning that a $2000 server would be a big chunk taken straight from the profits, not to mention administering it, dealing with complaints, etc.

Advertising for this? Maybe back in the net, or rather the web's, boom days. But now even big sites have had problems getting paying advertisers. So then - to have ads help pay for the server, you have to pay someone to solicit ads. Oops - then you have to generate enough advertising revenue to pay their salary as well as the costs of the server.

There's a reason Shrapnel's banners are almost all for games they sell.