this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Totally negligible. All you need to keep is a line in a database with the person's email, hashed and salted password, and a unique identifier for each game they own - that's an amount of space that won't even register on any service nowadays. There might be other optional stuff that takes more space, like display pics, cloud saves etc but you can delete those without deleting the whole account.
Napkin maths to illustrate the point: Steam's game IDs are short numbers, typically close to 5 digits long. ASCII characters are one byte each, so let's assume 5 bytes plus one more for a separator character per game. If you wanted to store 8 billion accounts with 50 games each then the IDs would be about 2.4 TB, so a consumer hard drive worth ~$100 would do the job at least in the raw terms of data capacity
Your sums are right, but a 'hard disk somewhere' is not a robust, always on-line database. Running a 3TB Postgres instance on Amazon RDS will set you back something more like $1k/mo. Still absolute pocket change for Ubi, though.
https://calculator.aws/#/addService/RDSPostgreSQL