>>16666860I'm bored.
Suppose the service has 7 million users, and is hosted on Amazon EC2. Let's be super-generous and assume 5 terabytes of uploaded data and 5 terabytes of downloaded data every month. Let's also pick the most expensive instance type available, throw in a few load balancers, and make regular snapshots of any changes.
All of that amounts to less than $10,000 a month. Most of it is spent on backups; the bandwidth is only worth about $600. At 7 million users, they're bringing home $3 MILLION a month in yearly fees. They could charge their users $1 a year and still bring home a small fortune in profits.
Keep in mind that they WON'T spend nearly this much on reliable hosting: This is Game Freak, and they're going to host it on an unused server rack in their basement. The PokéBank launch is going to be an absolute disaster.
