Build vs. buy your game backend.

Build effort. Feature effort is in person-months and assumes one senior backend engineer using current AI coding tools and agents. The model applies a feature-specific 50 to 75 percent reduction to conventional implementation effort, then adds platform integration and scale hardening. These are production-ready v1 estimates, not prototype times. Console certification and other external lead times are not reduced by AI.

Ongoing staffing. Initial build effort and ongoing ownership are modeled separately. The initial build remains person-month based, but years 2-3 use whole-person staffing floors so the model never assumes a studio can hire a fraction of an engineer. Foundations starts at one backend engineer, Online at two, and Multiplayer or Complete at three, consistent with AccelByte's published planning baseline for a production multiplayer backend. The team steps up as PCCU grows. Managed cloud carries the lowest dedicated-SRE requirement; self-managed VMs and bare metal require more operations staff. Ongoing salaries use the same 1.3x loaded-cost factor as initial engineering. This is intentionally a planning floor, not a claim that every organization staffs identically.

Game type and platforms. Single-player and browser games use the same accounts, saves, economy, and analytics backend, just without matchmaking, servers, or chat. Each platform adds its own store, identity, and certification work. Console certification (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch) adds fixed external lead time that gates launch on both the build and buy sides.

Security and observability. Treated as always-on for a production backend: ongoing security and compliance are modeled at roughly 12 percent of infrastructure cost and observability at roughly 15 percent. On the build side, the whole-person operating team carries the operational and on-call ownership rather than adding fractional headcount derived from the AI-assisted build effort.

Infrastructure. Priced as line items: backend compute and orchestration, database and cache, network egress, storage, and a game server fleet where dedicated servers are selected. The managed baseline lands near $2,000 a month at 1,000 concurrent players. Hosting changes both unit cost and operating-team requirements: managed cloud has higher unit rates with less operational burden, while bare metal can become cheaper at high scale but requires more dedicated operations staffing.

Audience and AccelByte pricing. You enter MAU and the calculator derives PCCU as 1 percent of monthly active users, matching the planning ratio used in AccelByte public examples. AGS is billed per daily peak concurrent user on tiered rates. Public Cloud includes the first 30 CCU free; Private Cloud adds a fixed monthly environment fee and uses the published usage rates without that Public Cloud allowance. The default Public Cloud quota is 25,000 CCU, and AccelByte documents that higher quotas can be requested, so the calculator does not automatically switch or recommend Private Cloud at a fixed PCCU threshold. Private Cloud is shown separately as the dedicated-environment option for teams that need isolation, control, custom configuration, or enterprise requirements. AMS uses the current North America East cpx1.2x list rate of $0.1197 per server-hour. Network egress on the AccelByte side is billed separately and is not included here. Run the pricing calculator for an exact figure.

Revenue. Context only and never included in either cost total. Monthly revenue is MAU multiplied by the monthly revenue per MAU you set above. This keeps monetization explicit: two games with the same audience can have very different economics. The resulting revenue is used only for the backend-cost-as-a-percent-of-revenue row.