If it only takes two hours, the concurrent player counts are not going to be that high

If you are going to use it enough to pay for it sure. But that’s always been the case.

The main benefits of cloud are it’s ability to scale quickly, it’s ability to provide geographic reach and the conversation of capex to opex.

They are backups, you potentially get copy’s of the data in multiple locations across continents.

BUT I agree, you are relying on them entirely for it. Lots of vendor tie in stuff in the industry unfortunately.

With some of the cloud providers, their built in backups are linked to the resource. So even if you have super duper geo-zone redundant backups for years, they still get nuked if you drop the server.

It’s always felt a bit stupid, but the backups can still normally be restored by support.