Higher player counts and more detailed worlds? It's 2026 and we regularly watch 4k video streams @ 25mbps. Seems like games should be able to get away with sending this amount of bandwidth too for a higher fidelity experience.
You don't really ever stream games in normal situations in the same manner though. The content is mostly rendered client side, why does the server need so much bandwidth?
Game data and video data have very different constraints. Depends on the nature of the game, of course, but with jitter and all that, video can just run a buffer and manage network conditions (more) trivially, but a game needs things to be a lot tighter to avoid gameplay-impacting desync
There is nothing "democratizing" about hosting your game's servers on AWS.
Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.
Would this also mean lower latency between two locations? One interesting case for me would be lowering latency in StarCraft: Brood War, which is cursed by having 90% of its player base in South Korea, with the rest of us foreigners spread all over the world.
What is this game doing that uses so much bandwidth? Pretty sure most games use something like 2mbps.
Your game can have zero hosting cost if you just let players host their own servers. Let people play the game they paid for, forever, instead of locking them in to playing on an AWS server then killing the game in a couple of years when it's not profitable anymore.