Game Server Rental Service: Earn $6K Annually
The experience was pretty interesting. My co-founder and I were mainly doing this to complete a business assignment from school—we needed to build a project, so my classmates and I brainstormed a bunch of ideas before settling on running private servers for open-world games. But let's be honest, my technical skills weren't exactly up to scratch, so instead of building one from scratch, I took out a loan to acquire an existing project. I found one that was bringing in less than 2,000 RMB a month. After looking at its revenue over the past few years (averaging under 10,000 RMB annually across 2018, 2019, and 2020), I struck a deal and bought it for 25,000 RMB.
Once I owned it, I tried running Google Ads. That didn't work at all—I spent 4,000 RMB on ads and only got 60 users, so I gave up on that channel. Instead, I started partnering with gaming creators across various social platforms, offering them free server space in exchange for promotion. It took six months, but I managed to grow monthly revenue from around 1,000 RMB to 5,000 RMB.
Actually, quite a few open-world games support setting up your own private servers. For instance, the Chinese gaming forum TapTap has a business line where they run private servers in partnership with developers. Some players really prefer running their own private servers—they get better connection stability and can play without worrying about lag from other people's servers. I think there are even some individual operators in China doing this kind of thing; I'm pretty sure I've heard about it somewhere before.