MM vs Persistent Servers

@Twordy

I'm afraid nobody will be able to provide you with that in EUR and Cents -- except EA and they most likely won't. 😉

This depends on how many instances they can run on the given hardware, the tick rate, how optimized the server code is. If enough people are playing, the cost will most likely be determined by the server instances and not their infrastructure layer. If nobody is playing, then it's only the infrastructure that needs to be payed for. So the answer is: it depends -- and nobody other than EA (and Amazon) will know the details on how much they have to pay and what the number is that you would have to divide by the number of players to get to the cost per player your were looking for. 😉

@DuaneDibbley what I am aiming at is how much time and resources do EA/dev studio need to write the code supporting permanent servers. I know the costs of rental servers.

@Twordy
What do you mean by 'time and resource needed'? None to just support permanent servers as they already do that with Portal. The functionality for that is there. They could create an 'Official Portal server' with all maps in rotation and this would already make sure you have a proper map rotation, would stay together on the same server with your friends, even if spread over multiple squads, would not have to load and quit out of the same map again and again until the one you want to play comes up, etc.

So, this basic functionality they could ALREADY provide if they wanted to. Today with NO additional effort. They simply don't want to. Why that is I cannot say. But it's not the cost for implementing anything.