Sort of depends though. If they had a deal like the company I work for, the cost is definitely not trivial. We use Dell as our datacenter, and we are constantly having to keep track of server usage. They charge us the monthly fee, even when we do not use the machines. And when we decide to shut down some of the machines, we had to get it into our contract, because by default, as long as the overall environment is up, we get charged for it, plus a fee for any VMs over a certain number. IBM handles our other datacenter, and they are just as bad. I only have direct experience with those two providers. Maybe others are better. If NCSoft (or whatever MMO parent company you want to include) already had their own datacenter, meaning not renting space from another company, then I would agree that the costs are negligible. Likely they would use it for things OTHER than just one game.
I said I could run it for very low costs. I did not say I wouldn't charge you lots to do it. :p
What it costs to do and what people charge you to do it are two different things. And in hosting, those things are practically independent things.
Also, when you run datacenters you start to think completely differently about costs; at least I do. A $25,000 server sounds like an expensive thing, but I don't see the number 25,000 anymore. I see the number 730. That's the monthly lease payment on a $25,000 server (3yr term). A 2016 $25k server is a behemoth 40 core (two socket) Xeon with 768GB of ram. It is possible that is more computing power than all of City of Heroes launched with in 2004. Based on what they could possibly have been running in 2012 vs what you can buy today, it could probably support several hundred simultaneous players running the last server iteration.
Bandwidth is probably a bigger concern than hardware or hosting costs. But then again, 1gig and 10gig internet is available for thousands of dollars a month. City of Heroes needs like 20-50k per player, so even a couple thousand players is probably less than 100mb/sec of internet, not including client downloads. That's hundreds, maybe a couple grand a month of redundant BGP interconnects.
Stuff just keeps getting cheaper if you know what you're doing. My 200
Terabyte NAS configurations are probably going to become obsolete in 2017, replaced with
300 TB capacity NAS configurations. For basically peanuts.
