I'm pretty sure they had immense scaling capabilities, but were hitting upon bottlenecks which were unexpected. I'd be also really interested in what those were.
It's just not economically viable to scale your architecture to day-one or week-one traffic requirements. Look at Blizzard games for comparison, a new release every year or so and they're NEVER equipped to handle it. They know that by the end of the month, user count will drop sharply before stabilizing at a much more manageable level.
I have to disagree with regards to Overwatch, by far Blizzard's biggest IP in recent memory. The launch was perhaps the smoothest I've ever seen in a popular online game. A tiny minority of people had problems, in stark contrast with completely unprepared and utterly botched launches such as Battlefield 4. Blizzard did themselves a huge service with the open beta(which had over 9 million people play over the course of a week!) giving them an idea of where bottlenecks would crop up.
Right but it's odd that "very few issues" for a game (overwatch in this case) includes multiple hours of outage in like the first week or two. (Though like you point out, it is way less than other popular releases)
There's just a staggering difference between the number of 9s offered by game companies vs more reliable parts of the industry. Shit most online games still don't have login servers that scale easily to meet dynamic load.
The more reliable parts of the industry didn't get there instantly on day one like we seem to expect games to do. They got there by refining their process over plenty of time. Every large system that works developed from a small system that did. Games just aren't afforded that luxury as they have to maximize their launch hype and get slammed on day one.
Another good example of this are the Steam sales, especially the big ones (summer and christmas sales render the store completely unusable for the first day or so)
It's "good enough" for the week of the sale, upgrading all the servers for a week of super heavy traffic just to see them idle the rest of the year isn't a great business plan
There are several firms that offer computing capacity online, at much more granular terms than "the rest of the year". It seems these "cloud" computing services are common topics of discussion here on HN.
The calculus has to be how much it would cost to temporarily bring in, run, maintain e.g. AWS boxes versus how much revenue is left on the table by the slow store. I presume Blizzard has run those numbers and decided it wasn't worth it.
