Some games require massive amounts of compute, but the bandwidth to deliver the assets is generally paid by Apple.
I can guarantee you, your company is paying a metric fuck-ton more. It is called Apple's 30% cut.
Your company is paying AWS $200k to pass json messages around for analytics and social aspects of the game. You are paying Apple something like $1 million per week to distribute, market, and collect payments for the game.
I am not saying your company is dumb, or Apple is evil. I am saying your experience and anecdote isn't relevant to Ruby Gems, and offering a different way to think about the games industry vs. the open source software distribution world.
We aren't paying that much in cut just yet. We're a small team (6 engineers in total). You don't have to be pulling in millions per week to get high on the grossing charts. We're probably around 1/4 of what you estimated.
Though you mention delivering the assets. Actually (like a lot of games) we make a big effort in getting under 50MB over-the-air limit on the App Store. The total content for retina iPhone is ~300MB, delivered in parts as you progress in the game. That's kept on S3, downloaded through CloudFront.
But yes! You're right, it's mostly a hell of a lot of JSON flying around.
Have somebody spend a day or two looking for low-hanging performance fruit. Start with your JSON library, there are some slow ones out there. Also see if you might be unnecessarily de/serializing data structures multiple times in a single thread or process, I've seen that kind of thing creep up over time in reasonably modular codebases.
We support non retina devices, which are stuck on iOS 6. When this came out we weren't sure whether it applied to that too, so stuck with 50. We'd already been keeping it under 50 for 6 months by then so we had all the infrastructure set up, its mostly automated.
Haven't looked at it since iOS 7 launch though, do you know if it was iOS 6 too?
Just checked with a couple folks here, the limit is for the iTunes store, and therefore was also raised for iOS 6 (we assume older versions as well, but don't support them either).
If you've got Business or Enterprise support from AWS, look at their Trusted Advisor product. Its included, and does sanity checks for cost and security against all of the AWS resources you're using.
The most interesting thing that I found about dealing with stuff at 6 figure+ scale per month on AWS was the un-advertised limits (nodes, provisioned volumes / total size, snapshots, elbs, etc) that you have to either hit, or extract from your account manager.
If anyone ever ends up doing something like this; ask them upfront!
I'm not on the server team, so I don't know exactly what contributes most to it. But part of me really thinks it could be reduced!