Network Egress
Network egress is data leaving a provider's network, and egress fees are what the provider charges for it. In multiplayer hosting that is player traffic, and because it scales with concurrency rather than with server count, it is often one of the largest and least predictable lines on the bill. Ingress is usually free; the asymmetry is deliberate.
Also called
egress, egress fees, bandwidth costs
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What Counts as Network Egress in a Multiplayer Game?
Every game server sends data out, so every game server has egress. Whether it appears as its own line on the invoice is a pricing decision the provider makes, not a property of the traffic.
The traffic itself has a predictable shape. Player inputs travel in: a few button states and a camera angle, small and frequent but light. Match state travels out: positions, health, projectiles and events for everything each player needs to see, sent to every player in the match, many times a second. The server reads each input once. It sends each state change to every player who needs it.
That makes multiplayer traffic mostly outbound by design. On a provider that meters egress, the direction a game sends most of its data is the direction that gets billed.
Not all of a game's egress comes from match servers. Patch and asset downloads are egress too, usually served through a CDN on a separate bill. Logs, metrics and calls from a game server to a backend in another region or zone are often billed as well, at their own rate. This page is about the match traffic.
What Drives a Game's Egress Bill?
Match egress is a multiplication: send rate × data per update × players receiving it × hours played.
Send rate. Most servers send state on every tick or every few ticks. Doubling the tick rate without changing anything else roughly doubles the outbound traffic.
Data per update. How much of the world goes into each packet. Delta compression sends only what changed since the last state the client confirmed. Quantization stores a position or an angle in fewer bits.
Players receiving it. In a naive design, every player is sent the state of every other player, so per-player traffic grows with match size. Interest management, also called relevancy, sends each player only what is near or visible to them.
Hours played. Concurrency and session length. This is the term you don't control.
Server count is missing from the list. The bill follows players, not machines. The first three terms are design decisions, which is why netcode choices made in a prototype can show up on an invoice a year after launch.
Who Charges for Egress: Cloud or Bare Metal?
The split usually follows the type of hosting.
Cloud providers meter it. Egress is billed per GB, in volume tiers, at a price that depends on where the traffic goes. On Google Cloud, Premium Tier internet egress to North America starts at $0.12 per GiB, and to Australia, South America and Korea at $0.19 (Google Cloud network pricing, October 2026). Hosting near players keeps latency low, and in some regions it also raises the price of every GB those players receive.
Bare metal providers usually include it. You rent the whole machine by the month and bandwidth comes with it, often up to a traffic allowance or port speed set in the contract. A busy weekend doesn't change the bill.
Included egress is not free capacity. You pay for the host every hour of the month, full or empty, and capacity is fixed: when players outnumber your machines, they wait or the overflow goes somewhere else. Metered cloud is the reverse. It absorbs any spike and charges for every GB of it.
Edgegap offers both. Private Fleet hosts are reserved machines in 58 locations (platform data, as of 18 September 2026), with 6 TB of egress included per host (private fleet documentation). When demand exceeds the fleet, deployments overflow to the Edge Cloud, where egress is $0.10 per GB.
How Can You Estimate Egress Before Launch?
The first three terms of the multiplication can be measured long before launch.
Run a playtest at your target match size and record the outbound kilobits per second per player on the server. Your engine's network profiler or the host's network counters both work.
Convert it: kbps × 3,600 ÷ 8,000 gives megabytes per player-hour.
Multiply by the player-hours you expect per month.
As an illustration, not a benchmark: 40 kbps per player is 18 MB per player-hour. An average of 1,000 concurrent players around the clock comes to about 13 TB a month.
Run the number twice. At your expected average, it shows how much traffic a reserved baseline would carry. At your launch peak, it shows what metered egress would cost on the day you can least predict. Measure again after every netcode change, because the first three terms move with it.
A word from our sponsor (ourselves!)
Private Fleets give you dedicated bare-metal compute in 58 locations for persistent, cost-effective, egress-free hosting. When your player base spikes, Edge Cloud automatically absorbs the overflow on demand, keeping online performance steady wherever your players are.
Edgegap's Take (just our opinion, take it with a grain of salt!)
Egress Is One Line, Not the Decision
Egress is one the line studios notice first, because it grows with success. It is still one line. Compute, idle capacity and the engineering to run it all sit on the same bill, and none of them appear in a per-GB comparison.
The other side of the scale is what players feel. The cheapest GB is no saving if it comes from a server far from the players receiving it, because they pay for it in latency every match. Bare metal with egress included sits in fewer locations. Metered cloud reaches more players, closer. Neither wins on both counts.
For most games the answer is a hybrid: reserved machines where your players concentrate and concurrency never drops, cloud for the peaks and for players far from your fleet. The mix differs per game. A regional title with a steady population leans on reserved hosts. A global launch with unknown demand leans on cloud. Before comparing prices, map where your players are and when they play. That map sets the mix, and the mix sets the egress bill.
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