SCP-5615 — SCP-5615 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-5615 Euclid ~ medium confidence

SCP-5615

Expected annual

$5.4M

One-time setup

$14.5M

Annual recurring

$4.9M

Personnel

Initial one-time build and large contingency reserves dominate upfront costs (~$14.5M), while recurring yearly costs are driven primarily by embedded corporate assets, research staff, covert retention, and continuous engineering/monitoring (~$4.88M/year).

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $14.5M

Major Failure Shutdown Reserve $10.0M

[#20] Catastrophic reserve for full buyouts, mass amnesticization campaigns, legal settlements, or sanctioned shutdowns.

Pr Mass Communication Reserve $2.0M

[#12] One-time PR / mass-communication contingency reserve for escalated public exposure response.

Containment Relocation Emulation $1.0M

[#11] One-time project to migrate live instances to isolated emulation if cooperation withdrawn.

Covert Recruitment Bonus $500K

[#2] One-off recruitment/relocation/hush payments for major new embedded assets or buyouts.

Insurance Contingency Fund $500K

[#15] One-time contingency fund for indemnity/settlement reserves (separate from annual premiums).

Sandbox Development $300K

[#3] One-time secure sandbox/emulator development, reverse-engineering, QA and legal clearance.

Incident Response Setup $125K

[#6] One-time runbooks, tooling, and rehearsal/drill setup for rapid takedown capability.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $60K

[#10] One-time lab equipment, GPUs and compute for analysis and emulation (estimated midpoint).

Facilities $0

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Equipment $0

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🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $4.9M/yr

Staff Wages $1.9M/yr

[#1, #10] Embedded corporate assets (covert contractors/insiders) and multidisciplinary research team salaries including payroll overhead and compartmentalization pay.

Covert Payments And Retention $1.0M/yr

[#2] Ongoing hush-money, retention bonuses, and rotation funds for assets where outright hiring is infeasible.

Live Server Operations $400K/yr

[#4] Continuous monitoring/IDS, SOC-style operations, and on-call engineering for live servers (tooling + staffing).

Amnestic And Witness Handling $300K/yr

[#9] Per-incident amnesticization, travel, medic/support costs; modeled as recurring based on expected incident rate.

Incident Response On Call $250K/yr

[#6] Ongoing on-call engineering and legal coverage costs for rapid takedown and rollback capability.

Ongoing Software Development $250K/yr

[#18] Continuous engineering to implement and maintain in-game restrictions and patches as game updates.

Insurance Premiums $200K/yr

[#15] Annual insurance premiums and indemnity coverage for operations that risk publicity or litigation.

Cover Story And Legal $150K/yr

[#8] Legal retainer and contractual cover for NDAs, takedowns, and ongoing corporate cooperation.

Community Counterintelligence $150K/yr

[#7] Continuous OPSEC vs. dataminers: planted posts, paid moderators, influencer messaging, targeted ad buys.

Sandbox Hosting $120K/yr

[#3] Hosting and maintenance of sandbox/emulation environments (monthly hosting costs).

Logistics And Transport $60K/yr

[#13] Field travel for operatives coordinating with company staff and in-person witness handling / events.

Legal Action Fund $50K/yr

[#8] Annual reserve for episodic legal actions, subpoenas, or targeted takedown costs.

Training And Compliance $30K/yr

[#16] Ethics review, memetic protocol training, and compliance oversight costs.

Backup And Forensic Storage $25K/yr

[#5] Encrypted append-only backups, off-site replication, and forensic log retention.

Energy And Datacentre $20K/yr

[#19] Power, cooling, rack space and datacentre costs for sandbox and researcher compute.

Supplies And Consumables $15K/yr

[#17] Operational consumables, memetic cartridges, secure USBs, encrypted phones, medical kits.

Licensing And Subscriptions $10K/yr

[#14] Game accounts, developer passes, debugging licenses, analytics/monitoring subscriptions.

Facilities Maintenance $0/yr

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Research And Monitoring $0/yr

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⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $4.9M/yr

70.0% probability / year

Normal year with routine containment and no major public exposure; only scheduled operations and recurring activities.

no_public_leak steady_company_cooperation

🚨 Minor Incident $5.5M/yr

25.0% probability / year +$600K vs baseline

Localized leak or dataminer discovery requiring emergency community ops, targeted legal actions, and elevated incident response.

dataminer_leak small-scale_investigative_coverage

🚨 Major Breach $12.9M/yr

5.0% probability / year +$8.0M vs baseline

Widespread public exposure or investigative journalism leading to loss of cooperation and need for relocation, large settlements, or major PR buys.

widespread_public_exposure company_refuses_cooperation major_investigative_report

👥 Personnel 12 total

Role	Count	Notes
Embedded corporate asset / Covert contractor	8	[#1] Senior-level contractors or informants inside Activision Blizzard paid as long-term embedded assets.
Research Scientist / Game-engineering / AI	4	[#10] Multidisciplinary research team (3–6 typical); salaries included in staff_wages.

📋 Confidence Notes

Analyst notes provide detailed cost ranges for operational items, but many high-variance, reserve-style one-time contingencies (PR/settlements, catastrophic shutdown) and uncertainties about company cooperation reduce precision; mid-range estimates used.

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