devtrackers.gg
Does this mean that microtransactions are on the way?
Looking at Vivox's billing rate (as of 2022 anyway), the service costs $1500/m/5k PCU (peak concurrent users) with 50k PCU. This means that could cost ~$3.60/user/yr. For a game that costs $14 (now $11 on sale), that's a LOT of overhead.
Either they're expecting a lot of growth and coming out of early access in the forseeable future, there's DLC on the way, or some sort of microtransaction is being planned.
I don't understand the move. P2P voice chat has worked for decades. Certainly finding an engineer to properly implement it has got to be cheaper in the long run.
EDIT: Forgot about the console version! Still a weird amount of overhead to have on a game that has lobbies of only 4 people.