what is the cost of maintaining a FPS XBLA multiplayer game? I know many of these FPS game developers doesn't host the games but more like match making service. I was browsing google but couldn't find any info. Any help is greatly appreciated. thanks!

It really depends on what you mean.

You can pay Microsoft to use their XNA Creator Club and publish games through it. This gets you online for about $100/year, plus whatever extra costs you incur. You are responsible for doing everything yourself, so it can be as cheap or as expensive as you want.

Or you can become an official developer and make "real" commercial games. This route requires an established business, experienced talent, and (usually) at least seven digits in your bank account to fund the project.

so does a game like Halo or COD 4 have dedicated servers? or they only match making and the players themselves host their own games?

here is an example of my worries of creating an XBLA FPS multiplayer

- lets say it's a miracle and the game sold 100K copies on XBLA. so there are 100K possible players wanting to play online. The game is 32 player max per game.

- so how much would it cost to maintain the game experience for 100K players per month?

- i'm new at this so please forgive me if my questions are silly.

I am not completely sure, not a developer at that level quite yet. But I believe that XBL titles are hosted on Dedicated Servers, or their matchmaking is relentless on maintaining real-time speeds between clients.

For an indie, the best route to go is matchmaking. A single dedicated server relatively capable of hosting any time of client/server architecture will run you upwards of 100 dollars a month (haven't been checking around recently feel free to correct me on anything)

For match making you will only really need one, and a good way to sort and handle matches.

I don't believe you would be able to run dedicated servers through Xbox Live. Microsoft is very, very picky when it comes to allowing dedicated servers. In fact, they don't like it at all, because it gives third parties access to their account system.

You would most certainly need to use a peer to peer system. There are only a few games on the Xbox 360 that use dedicated servers and almost all of them are EA games. Call of Duty and Halo use P2P.

I'm not exactly sure how you do matchmaking with a P2P system on Xbox Live.

I have no idea exactly how matchmaking works on Xbox Live but I can provide a theory.

I believe there is some sort of API (similar to retrieving gamercard info) which narrows gamers down to the game they're playing and the game mode they are searching for. You can get this list, and possibly sort it by ping and location, and that's how you find other players to connect to.