I have to disagree with regards to Overwatch, by far Blizzard's biggest IP in recent memory. The launch was perhaps the smoothest I've ever seen in a popular online game. A tiny minority of people had problems, in stark contrast with completely unprepared and utterly botched launches such as Battlefield 4. Blizzard did themselves a huge service with the open beta(which had over 9 million people play over the course of a week!) giving them an idea of where bottlenecks would crop up.

> a new release every year or so and they're NEVER equipped to handle it

Which is 100% untrue for Overwatch. They've clearly learned their lessons.

If this is true, your horizontal scaling is the problem. Not taking advantage of those users with auto scaling is leaving money on the table.

Another good example of this are the Steam sales, especially the big ones (summer and christmas sales render the store completely unusable for the first day or so)

It's "good enough" for the week of the sale, upgrading all the servers for a week of super heavy traffic just to see them idle the rest of the year isn't a great business plan