Source: https://gameye.com/glossary/network-egress/ --- title: "Network Egress | Gameye" description: "Network egress is what cloud providers charge for outbound data — the largest hidden infrastructure cost for game studios, and the most underestimated." --- # Network Egress Network egress is the cost cloud providers charge for data leaving their network — for game servers, this is typically the largest hidden infrastructure expense and the one studios most often underestimate. Cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) charge nothing for data entering their network (ingress) but charge per gigabyte for data leaving it (egress). For game servers this is almost always a one-sided equation: players send small inputs to the server (ingress, free) and the server sends large, frequent state updates back to all players (egress, charged). A 64-player battle royale server sending 60 game state updates per second generates substantial egress traffic — constantly, for the duration of every session. ## Why egress costs surprise studios Egress fees are easy to underestimate because they appear nowhere in the headline pricing. A cloud provider quotes you a compute instance price and a storage price. The egress charge is buried in the networking section and compounds silently as your player count grows. A studio running 10,000 concurrent players might be paying $0.08–$0.09 per GB of egress on a major cloud provider. At that scale, egress can easily match or exceed the compute cost of the instances themselves. Studios that budget carefully for servers often discover mid-launch that their networking bill is 50–100% on top of what they planned for. ## The bare-metal difference Bare-metal infrastructure providers typically include bandwidth in a flat monthly rate rather than charging per gigabyte. A dedicated bare-metal machine might come with 10–20TB of included monthly bandwidth. For high-traffic game servers this fundamentally changes the economics — egress stops being a variable cost that scales with player count and becomes a fixed line in the budget. This is one of the primary reasons orchestration platforms that blend bare-metal and cloud infrastructure (rather than running exclusively on cloud) can deliver substantially lower total cost at scale. You route sessions to bare-metal nodes by default and burst to cloud only when capacity requires it — keeping the majority of your egress traffic on infrastructure where bandwidth is included. ## Egress and your matchmaker Egress costs are also affected by where you place servers relative to players. A server in the wrong region doesn’t just hurt latency — it pushes traffic across more network hops, potentially crossing provider boundaries and incurring additional egress charges. Good region selection reduces both latency and bandwidth cost simultaneously. **See also:** [Bare-metal servers](https://gameye.com/glossary/bare-metal-servers/) · [Cloud servers](https://gameye.com/glossary/cloud-servers/) · [Scalability](https://gameye.com/glossary/scalability/) · [Server regions](https://gameye.com/glossary/server-regions/) · [Gameye pricing — no egress fees](https://gameye.com/pricing/) Building a multiplayer game? Gameye hosts dedicated game servers: ship your server as a Docker container and start one per match with a single API call, in a region near your players. [See how it works →](https://gameye.com/how-it-works/) [Back to Glossary](https://gameye.com/glossary/) ## Related terms - ### Bare-metal servers A bare-metal server is a physical machine which lives inside a data centre. It’s a place where you’ll host your games matches and sessions. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/bare-metal-servers/) - ### Cloud servers Your cloud server is a virtual server. It runs in a cloud computing environment, and it's a place where you’ll host your games’ matches and sessions. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/cloud-servers/) - ### Session hosting Session hosting is when a server, or computer, runs your game’s matches. Each match, with a set group of people, is considered a session. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/session-hosting/) - ### Scalability Scalability is infrastructure’s ability to handle rising player demand — more sessions, regions, and traffic — without degrading performance or manual ops. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/scalability/) - ### Idle machines An idle machine is a provisioned server that's powered on and ready but not running a game session — on standby, waiting to be allocated. Idle capacity speeds up player starts but costs money while it waits. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/idle-machines/)