Network egress is, simply, data exiting the cloud. Which for game developers often means a surprise, un-estimated cost of their game’s cloud budget after the multiplayer game’s launch.

Specifically, when you deploy up multiplayer game servers, every state update, voice packet, and asset stream that leaves the provider’s network counts as outbound traffic, and those gigabytes add up fast. In other words, the minute data travels to your players’ devices, you’re on the hook for costs.

While Egress may be relatively small for certain genres (e.g., turn-based games, trading cards games) it can be a much greater expense for with high synchronicity requirements and asset stream like MMOs, high player count games like Battle Royale or games with high tick rate like eSport-ready games and VR/XR games.

Thus, it “pays” to know how egress works before you launch and learn how to optimize it. As Egress fees might be negligible during alpha tests, but they can skyrocket once you hit thousands of DAUs. Designing with cost in mind “pays”

What is Egress, and What it Means for Multiplayer Games

Egress is data exiting the cloud.

In a gaming context, it’s every frame of game state you send to clients, every sound effect in a voice channel, and every texture or map download you serve from storage.

When your server pushes position updates dozens of times per second to hundreds of concurrent players, those bytes translate directly into your monthly bill. Even seemingly trivial features—like in‑game replay clips or chat logs—can generate surprising outbound traffic if they’re streamed or downloaded frequently.

Ingress vs Egress for Multiplayer Games

What is defined as “ingress” (i.e., uploading player inputs) is generally free. When clients send movement commands or chat messages to your server, that inbound traffic usually doesn’t incur charges, creating an asymmetric billing model.

Egress (or more visually clear, “downloads”), on the other hand, trigger egress fees. The cloud provider tallies the outbound gigabytes and bills accordingly, which can skew your cost projections if you’re not watching.

Why Providers Charge for Game Traffic

Unsurprisingly, cloud networks cost money to operate.

Behind every request for data is a web of routers, transit agreements with ISPs, and data center interconnects that incur real expenses, which providers pass on to customers through egress fees. Peering deals matter too. Some cloud platforms negotiate better rates with network carriers or deploy more extensive global backbones, enabling them to offer lower egress costs in certain regions or between services, while others charge a premium for the same traffic.

Also, by putting a price on outbound bandwidth, providers incentivize architects to cache content closer to users, optimize data pipelines, or rethink cross‑cloud transfers instead of simply moving massive datasets without regard for cost.

Thus, it is critical for game developers to leverage orchestration that minimizes egress fees on its behalf, while optimizing its own backend infrastructure and game server to minimize Egress fees.

Bare Metal & Egress

Bare metal servers can seem appealing because they typically come with a fixed amount of bandwidth baked into your monthly fee, so you won’t see per‑gigabyte egress charges like you do in the cloud.

However, that predictability comes at a price: you’re locked into a specific hardware configuration, and scaling up means ordering, racking, and configuring new machines—often with lead times measured in days or weeks. There’s no instant elasticity, no provisioning, and no additional data centers at the click of a button.

You also shoulder the burden of hardware maintenance, firmware updates, and physical security yourself, which can divert your team’s focus away from feature development.

In short, while bare metal can eliminate surprise egress fees, it introduces capital expenditures, operational complexity, and rigidity that make it a risky choice as your sole hosting strategy.

Alternatively, for games with predictable player base, services like Edgegap’s has hybrid game server orchestration that leverages bare metal & cloud servers to optimize cost savings.

By using bare metal during steady periods (i.e., the "low tide" of CCUs), studios benefit from stable, reduced pricing. With straightforward per-machine rates, ongoing usage costs are easy to predict. When traffic surges, Edgegap’s rapid-scaling orchestration quickly adjusts to meet player demand, ensuring a seamless gameplay experience. Also, we recommend avoiding overpaying for unused capacity by using bare metal for a high player count (i.e., "high tide" or "peak" CCU) given player count fluctuates heavily over months and years, making your bare metal commitment expensive if unused.

Strategies to Minimize Egress Charges

In addition to an orchestration platform that is optimized to minimize egress costs like Edgegap’s, here are some key insights to review when developing your multiplayer:

• Caching: Caching delivers big savings. Deploying a content delivery network can offload repeated downloads of static assets from your origin storage, drastically cutting the bytes that actually exit the cloud environment and hit your invoice.

• Netcode: Efficient netcode reduces data transfer, which directly lowers egress costs—by sending only essential updates (e.g., deltas instead of full states) and optimizing message frequency, you minimize the amount of outbound traffic billed by cloud providers.

• Message prioritization: Prioritize critical messages or updates over less important ones to ensure efficient use of available bandwidth.

• Caching and caching invalidation: Implement caching mechanisms to reduce the need for frequent updates and minimize egress. Ensure that caching invalidation strategies are in place to maintain data consistency.

• Data serialization optimization: Optimize data serialization to minimize overhead, such as using varint encoding for integers or leveraging serialization libraries like MessagePack or BSON.

• Monitoring: Monitoring is essential. Setting up alerts on usage and billing thresholds ensures you catch spikes in egress before they balloon into unwelcome surprises, giving you time to investigate traffic sources or reconfigure your architecture.

• Data Pooling (“Batching”): Group multiple small updates or messages together to reduce the overhead of packet headers and improve compression ratios.

Egress Fees Comparison between Orchestration Platforms

As egress is often the “hidden” costs behind a game server hosting orchestration platform. Worse, providers will purposefully under-estimate it in their calculator to make their estimate look better. Which is only part of their hidden cost, as they'll often avoid mentioning they charge game studios for unused capacity of traditional orchestration.

At Edgegap, we’re upfront and transparent about our pricing for dedicated servers – $0.10/GB of monthly Network Egress as of time of writing (2025).

As a comparison, let’s look at the information (and when available) Egress price of common orchestration platform:

Edgegap is more affordable than any other platform in the market outside of North America thanks to its “one price” on Egress worldwide, and with competitive price for the AMER market

It is also the sole orchestration platform to allow for vCPU fractioning (i.e., ¼ of a vCPU = ¼ of the list price) and has “one price” for all its regionless network with 615+ locations worldwide, all available on-demand whereas other providers charge per location.

Conclusion

Designing with cost in mind lets you scale globally without watching your budget explode when your game scales with its popularity. Keep those outbound bytes in check!