There’s a natural break-even point between the cost of maintaining peak server capacity and the lost revenue of server outages, especially if that peak demand is primarily fixed-quantity for a unique product with a very low chance of giving up. Ticketmaster figured this out decades ago and clearly the major game platforms have learned it as well.

Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could.

Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.