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Paying to play online - how did we allow this?
- Thread starter HanzSnubSnub
- Start date
No it doesn't
No they aren't
I'm well aware what you're referring to. When it's sold on Steam they get 30%. If they thought third party sellers selling keys was a big problem for their business, they'd stop or limit that. None of that changes the point I was making. They are still getting higher royalties overall than MS and Sony.
Yes,
They do.
Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic:
"The game market system is pretty unfair," Sweeney explained at a keynote address as part of Gamescom's Devcom. "All of the app stores take 30% [of revenue per transaction]. That's strange, because Mastercard and Visa can do a transfer for three dollars." Sweeney also gives the example of a hundred million dollar transaction that just took place with Bitcoin, with a total transaction cost of just a couple of cents.
To name names, both Steam and GOG take 30% of your money when you buy a game on their platforms. Given the minimal costs to them, Sweeney reckons there's no reason for such a high cut – even if it is a better deal than devs would get at a physical store.
I'm still holding out hope that when next gen rolls around Microsoft will drop the bomb that Gold will no longer be required for online play. It's just the kind of goodwill Microsoft will need to gain an advantage going in to next gen. Gamepass will be the sub they push hard from here out.
You say "Steam takes 30% of all games sold!" omitting they do not get anything from games sold outside of Steam but that Steam provodes service for, which account for a big number (25-35%) in big gamea. The cut is also reduced for games that sell over a simple threshold.
Yet we cannot say Sony takes 30% of all games sold because they ALSO TAKE 15% for games sold outside their store (even if that number is a a bit more than in Steam).
Steam has also not started to cut down on selling games outside their service while Sony has recently started forbidding selling digital games in Amazon for instance.
In 2005 when Xbox Live matured into a solid platform, it was uncommon to have a unified network for gaming. Even while Steam had existed and was popular for a few years, most people (that I knew) still used Steam to manage their game library, but a separate server tool (HLSW, Gamespy, or the myriad other tools) to manage their server lists, or they had to use an in-game server manager, plus a different voice com tool like Ventrillo or TeamSpeak, plus a separate friends manager (GameSpy, or just something like your AOL instant messenger friends list)... etc.
Even on PC around when Microsoft was investing in an online platform, online PC gaming was fractured and separated. Attempts had been made to make unified networks, server list shares, friends list, and try to connect into games automatically to make it easier ... but a lot of games had their own friends list, their own logins, eveyrthing was independent.
On console it was obviously much, much worse. On the top console at the time, there was no online system console-wide. EAch individual game ran their own netcode, had their own server manager, no global friends list, no way to jump into someone elses game. I didn't have the original Xbox, but when I got an Xbox 360 after coming from a PS2, my mind was blown about how well integrated everything was. First, global persistent friends list. This wasn't something that wasn't even really common on PC at the time, and even while things like Gamespy had existed for years or other tools, they weren't unified or consistent. The fact that I could open up a list of friends and see who was online across the whole network was completely new for consoles (previously if you were playing Madden 2005 and a friend was playing antoher online console game (as few as there were), you couldn't see that they were online -- you had to boot down your game, launch Madden 2005, go to the online mode,a nd rely on EA's online mode ... Also it was all text input obviously, no mics, no messaging, etc). Even as a PC gamer at the time, I thought that Xbox Live was magical. Tap a friends name, click "join game," put in the disc of whatever they're playing and it skips all the bull shit and connects me to their game world? Plus voice messages, global messaging across the whole system over any game, in game voice chat that just worked for every game, a consistent server/client system for every game.
One of the reasons I bought an Xbox 360 was that Microsoft seemed committed to online play, something Sony seemed way behind on for me (I had been a Sony-primary console player for 2 generations at that point). Even with online expectations (I had been a PC primary gamer since about 1998 or 99), Xbox Live blew me away with features and the idea of paying whatever the price was for that at the time seemed well worth it. I had been used to patching together a myriad of different tools, HLSW, TeamSpeak server, Counter-Strike server, Steam or WON client, etc, for years ... and that this whole thing basically just worked out the box blew me away.
I think a lot of people are forgetting how behind Sony was on Playstation Network. It seemed so amateur compared to Xbox Live, and it seemed like Sony was caught off guard and had to quickly play catch up. Part of this is also probably what led to them rushing the service together and having the largest customer-facing security hack in history at the time. It's still one of the worst network hacks ever, with ~80m people having their accounts compromised, Sony waiting over a week to notify users that the system was compromised, 80m people having personally identified information hacked, and Sony stored user accounts and passwords unencrypted. Today still almost 10 years later, it's still one of the largest leaks of unencrypted usernames/passwords, and because it took them a week to notify users, hundreds of millions of user accounts across the internet were leaked. The network was also completely down for almost a month after that.
PSN was a joke until 2011+, generally after the PSN Hack when they got serious about making a modern gaming network as opposed to the ramshackle insecure mess that it was before that. Even base features of PSN didn't work until well into 2011, like resetting your password (the PS3 gave you a URL to to go to reset your password, and the URL Was broken for over a year... it was like the perfect anecdote to how shitty PSN was). By the end of that generation, PSN had mostly caught up and now both are at feature parity.
Now it's not worth it at all and I think it'd be good for Sony and Microsoft to offer their base Xbox Live and PSN stuff for free with online gaming, and then sell things like GamePass, Games WIth Gold, PS+, PS Now, or whatever as the paid tier.
Even on PC around when Microsoft was investing in an online platform, online PC gaming was fractured and separated. Attempts had been made to make unified networks, server list shares, friends list, and try to connect into games automatically to make it easier ... but a lot of games had their own friends list, their own logins, eveyrthing was independent.
On console it was obviously much, much worse. On the top console at the time, there was no online system console-wide. EAch individual game ran their own netcode, had their own server manager, no global friends list, no way to jump into someone elses game. I didn't have the original Xbox, but when I got an Xbox 360 after coming from a PS2, my mind was blown about how well integrated everything was. First, global persistent friends list. This wasn't something that wasn't even really common on PC at the time, and even while things like Gamespy had existed for years or other tools, they weren't unified or consistent. The fact that I could open up a list of friends and see who was online across the whole network was completely new for consoles (previously if you were playing Madden 2005 and a friend was playing antoher online console game (as few as there were), you couldn't see that they were online -- you had to boot down your game, launch Madden 2005, go to the online mode,a nd rely on EA's online mode ... Also it was all text input obviously, no mics, no messaging, etc). Even as a PC gamer at the time, I thought that Xbox Live was magical. Tap a friends name, click "join game," put in the disc of whatever they're playing and it skips all the bull shit and connects me to their game world? Plus voice messages, global messaging across the whole system over any game, in game voice chat that just worked for every game, a consistent server/client system for every game.
One of the reasons I bought an Xbox 360 was that Microsoft seemed committed to online play, something Sony seemed way behind on for me (I had been a Sony-primary console player for 2 generations at that point). Even with online expectations (I had been a PC primary gamer since about 1998 or 99), Xbox Live blew me away with features and the idea of paying whatever the price was for that at the time seemed well worth it. I had been used to patching together a myriad of different tools, HLSW, TeamSpeak server, Counter-Strike server, Steam or WON client, etc, for years ... and that this whole thing basically just worked out the box blew me away.
I think a lot of people are forgetting how behind Sony was on Playstation Network. It seemed so amateur compared to Xbox Live, and it seemed like Sony was caught off guard and had to quickly play catch up. Part of this is also probably what led to them rushing the service together and having the largest customer-facing security hack in history at the time. It's still one of the worst network hacks ever, with ~80m people having their accounts compromised, Sony waiting over a week to notify users that the system was compromised, 80m people having personally identified information hacked, and Sony stored user accounts and passwords unencrypted. Today still almost 10 years later, it's still one of the largest leaks of unencrypted usernames/passwords, and because it took them a week to notify users, hundreds of millions of user accounts across the internet were leaked. The network was also completely down for almost a month after that.
PSN was a joke until 2011+, generally after the PSN Hack when they got serious about making a modern gaming network as opposed to the ramshackle insecure mess that it was before that. Even base features of PSN didn't work until well into 2011, like resetting your password (the PS3 gave you a URL to to go to reset your password, and the URL Was broken for over a year... it was like the perfect anecdote to how shitty PSN was). By the end of that generation, PSN had mostly caught up and now both are at feature parity.
Now it's not worth it at all and I think it'd be good for Sony and Microsoft to offer their base Xbox Live and PSN stuff for free with online gaming, and then sell things like GamePass, Games WIth Gold, PS+, PS Now, or whatever as the paid tier.
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The fact that you need to specify PS3 in cases like this says a lot. Sega launched the prior generation with a dedicated online suite, and Sony by and large ignored their example for the entirety of that generation, despite having almost 2 years on the market before MS even entered (they sold the modem as a peripheral). This evolution was being stifled, and the PS3 having online functionality that was "fine" (not even comparatively good) was a direct result of 4 years of Xbox Live's example and increasing market threat. Even Steam in the PC sector is modeled directly off Xbox Live, and PC online gaming was very different and comparatively primitive before it (despite having a literal decade head start).
It's very easy to just say "we'd be here regardless", but as of that point in time we really weren't on that path at all, and Nintendo has done a good job of showing how online gaming could have evolved if there wasn't a clear example to follow. Hell, even mobile gaming today is largely still stuck in a Wild West of disconnected accounts and services that make any sort of larger community across games problematic.
Online gaming in the form it takes today was no more guaranteed in MS' absence than console gaming itself was without Nintendo. Online games would still exist yes, and they would still be on console... but a lot of the featureset we take for granted today could very well not be anywhere near standard, and almost assuredly wouldn't have been within a similar time-frame.
What are they getting, because the 30% figure is often cited as fact.
You should look up what's Steam actual cut instead of using that totally unbiased and objective source.
- I said PS3 because we were talking about the creation of Live, during the PS3 vs 360 era.
- The PS2 and Dreamcast did not have the power and an enough sofisticated operational system to compete with online PC gaming. The evolution was something natural, apart from Live...
- I really never had any issues with PS3 online. I don't know about you but I could always play any game I wanted online just fine. It is just too easy to throw these phrases degrading the PS3.
- The only thing that really changed on PC is the unification of many games and users on a single launcher. But in the end I am still playing fighting games P2P without a middleman, and playing indie games like Mordhaul or AAA games like Battlefield V on free community servers like I always did since Battlefield 1 or CS.
- We would never all be like Nintendo. That is why most online games are not there. Nintendo never cared too much about it. We were already great on PC way before Nintendo.
- Any game I play on my cellphone is also just fine, like japanese gatchas, Hearthstone, poker. I don't know what you are talking about.
- You are really just trying to paint a worse world than reality, and an apocalyptic future if Live didn't exist, when in fact we are almost the same thing we were on PC before Live, and also when, again, most gamers on the planet never even used live.
Just a quick summary for your Live and PC history comparison:
Before Live:
- I was able to host my own servers, play P2P games, play on official developer's dedicated servers, play on community servers, pay to access mmo servers.
After Live:
- I am still able to host my own servers, play P2P games, play on official developer's dedicated servers, play on community servers, pay to access mmo servers.
- Oh, and now we have steam friend list integrated with the games. Something completely optional where most people prefer to use discord, teamspeak or other third party systems. And I don't even think Live is the reason of this "evolution".
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Says here about 72% are sold on Steam, 28% on third parties. Again, that's Valve's choice to run their business like that. Do you think if Steam keys from third parties got to 90%, Steam would still be cool with it? 95%? 99%? I don't think so. If Gabe sold the company tomorrow, that could be cut to 0% the next day.
Why Valve actually gets less than 30 percent of Steam game sales
Commission-free Steam key sales through other stores cut into Valve's bottom line.
arstechnica.com
I remember that was based on a topic here on this site.
The percentage of full game sales on consoles that are sold by PSN/Live is 47% (EA number), 37% the year before, which was well up from 2013.
The main point is, just because the gamer isn't directly paying for it on PC doesn't mean it's free for the company to provide, nor does it mean gamers aren't indirectly paying for it with the billions they spend on Steam.
Since you seem to know more than the guy who co-founded ones of the biggest gaming companies in the world, how about you share it.
That %30 number pops up EVERYWHERE when referring to Steam's cut of the money.
Same way they were indirectly paying for it in consoles during the previous gen in both Sony and Nintendo consoles. I pay Nintendo 20€ a year for a service that is worse than their last gen consoles and yet you have people here defending that shit. Same with PSN "improvements" since becoming walled.Says here about 72% are sold on Steam, 28% on third parties. Again, that's Valve's choice to run their business like that. Do you think if Steam keys from third parties got to 90%, Steam would still be cool with it? 95%? 99%? I don't think so. If Gabe sold the company tomorrow, that could be cut to 0% the next day.
Why Valve actually gets less than 30 percent of Steam game sales
Commission-free Steam key sales through other stores cut into Valve's bottom line.
I remember that was based on a topic here on this site.
The percentage of full game sales on consoles that are sold by PSN/Live is 47% (EA number), 37% the year before, which was well up from 2013.
The main point is, just because the gamer isn't directly paying for it on PC doesn't mean it's free for the company to provide, nor does it mean gamers aren't indirectly paying for it with the billions they spend on Steam.
It also seems that if the case were to cover for not getting 30% on physical games, the cost pf ps+ would decrease as more digital gamea are sold... which is not the case.
Console games just have to accept that you get charged it because they can and if there was a possibility of not paying it in consoles, the cash cow would disappear.
You mean the guy who is competing against Steam might want not to tell the full truth as kt hurts its lema of Steam stealing from devs?
30% cut for gamea sold in Steam (decreases to 25 and then 20% after some thresholds).
0% on games sold outside of Steam but redeemable on Steam (infinite key generation available to devs for free).
On consoles:
30% on digital (no key distribution now in Sony as they dont even allow to sell digital games in Amazon)
15% on games sold outside of their store (that is physical).
So basically you lack the ability to read.
If a game is sold through Steam, it's %30.
Companies generating their own keys circumvents the system.
At any point, Steam can put the kibosh on that little program.
But it's getting away from the topic at hand.
Console and PCs online is a vastly different thing.
You can generate keys on Steam for free, you cant on consoles. Saying Steam can close it at amy point is also mute when they have never showed they would do that, unlike Sony which has closed sellong digital games outside of PSN store!!
The 30% is also a start point that changes after a sales threshold.
Ok, so it can be a sliding scale. But that %30 IS accurate.
Regardless of the spin that's on it, it starts off at %30.
Don't be shocked if Valve takes again the ability for these companies to generate commission free keys. Either they will take away the functionality, or start building in a fee with every key generated. They want to go around the commission structure, but still use their features.
It's a business, not a charity.
Except they have not shown any intention to do that ever since they created the store. Stocking the fear of Valve removing free key generation while omitting their entire story with it (meanwhile consoles are the one moving to remove their limited pay key generation to force you to buy through their stores) is just another way of trying to reason why you accept paying 60$ a year for mp.
In order:
- Live wasn't created during the PS3 vs 360 era. It was created during the DC/PS2/GC/Xbox era. PS3 era PSN is a result of PS2 era's Xbox Live.
- Console power has nothing to do with this. They lack a sophisticated enough OS because they lacked the vision for what it would be used for. PS3 was dramatically more powerful than OG Xbox, but the OS still became an issue because their vision for it didn't extend beyond what MS had already demonstrated the prior generation, and so wasn't adaptable for all the new features MS would introduce in generation 7. Without XBL this could have continued perpetually.
- PS3 PSN worked at a basic level. But something as simple as talking to someone that's playing one game whilst you're playing another wasn't possible. It was roughly on par with where Xbox Live was when they launched it for the OG Xbox.
- Unification is a huge change. It's was allows for online friends (that aren't irl friends already) to form across different online games. This isn't about p2p vs servers. This is about being able to hop between GTA and Apex Legends seamlessly with the same group of people without reverting back into IRC (or whatever chat client you'd use at the time) to organise everything, because nothing was connecting your online presence together.
- We're not like Nintendo in regards to online because the standard was changed and only Nintendo didn't care to take notice. Just like we weren't primarily playing on Commodore-like computers with large joysticks as the primary input, because the market adapted to a standard Nintendo set. Someone actually has to set these standards. Fate doesn't just sort everything out for itself.
- I didn't suggest playing on mobile isn't "fine". But it's fine in much the way PC online gaming used to be. It's disjointed and doesn't do much to foster community beyond the isolated ones each game has for theirselves. Let's say you add me on Fortnite and then after a few games we decide to play Minecraft together instead. Simple scenarios like this are significantly more convoluted on mobile (and were in every pre-XBL online gaming environment), and so communities largely remained isolated and people were reliant on stitching together a variety of apps and services just for basic online play together... much like Nintendo of today.
- I'm not trying to paint an apocalyptic future with Live. I'm describing exactly how things were pre and post Live, and detailing that the tihngs we now just expect to be there, nobody was expecting to be standard at the time even after years of online gaming being a thing before XBL existed. Conversely, you're looking to marginalise this for whatever reason under the assumption that everyone that spent all their pre-XBL days not getting this shit together certainly would have regardless.
And Sony could start sending Plus subscribers a gold coin monthly. Take THAT PC fans!!!
We're into hypotheticals now, Jesus Christ. What a weird ass post.
it's a feature not a bug
but yeah i guess steam could also just charge everyone 1000 dollars to allow people to access their accounts tomorrow
since we're just making shit up
Once it starts having an impact on the bottom line, you know damn well it's gonna get looked at.
Once again, business.. not a charity.
No one said it was a bug.
So now the conversation has moved to Steam fanboys defending their side. Gotcha.
Still doesn't change the issue that PC and console online structures are vastly different.
Can we steer it back to the actual subject?
I asked earlier whether if Steam keys sold by third parties got to 90%, 95%, 99% of all games sold, would Valve still be cool with that? If those key sellers get too successful I'm sure they'll be knee-capped. Don't you agree? Not sure how we've managed to jump to a hypothetical about charging $1,000 to access accounts.
1 - Sorry, I was trying to focus one the time when Live started charging. If i'm not wrong it was during the PS3 and 360 era. (Edit: it seems it was never free actually)
2 - Even if the live infrastructure existed before, the PS2 wasn't ready for it. It would not even have the power to multitask and run a party chat with voip while launchign a game. There is a time for technology to catch up.
3 - So we agree that PS3 and Xbox were both roughly on par when Xbox Live launched.
4 - Unification is cool, but it should not be forced behind a paywall. Most PC games are still and will ever be it's own thing. Overwatch does not communicate with Counter Strike, or Battlefield, or an MMO, and many other examples. And people live just fine, for free. It should be optional to pay for this unification since many people don't care, otherwise they would not play on PC or mobile.
5 - The online standard was already better than Nintendo's. It makes no sense to think we would go back in time and follow Nintendo.
6 - Again, especially in the mobile market, most players are casual and don't care about this unification. They just want to play candy crush online, poker, etc. And even most console gamers don't even have friends to play together. This unification is actually used by less people than it seems.
7 - Apart from this unification, which already existed in some instances on PC before Live, and still is not present in many PC games, the PC scenario is still mostly the same as before Live. I still don't see how mobile Hearthstone, MMOS, or PC servers would be different without Live. They never changed.
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User Banned (1 Day): trolling, antagonizing other members
Yes, you are very wrong here.
Live was a paid service since Day 1 of launch of the service on the OG Xbox.
It didn't start with the 360. The PS2 was out then and had jack crap for online support.
Like I said much earlier in this thread, I really feel like we are dealing with a bit of an age gap.
Those of us old enough to be around during the advent of console gaming remember just how much of a mess early online console gaming was.
Xbox Live was amazing in how universal it was. One friends list, messaging, etc, etc.
You really did feel like you were getting a premium service.
The things about Xbox Live on 360 that were better than PS3 for the most part were things that were included in the free Xbox Live service. Party chat, the interface and whatnot. The thing that was actually paid, the playing games online part, were not this massive gulf ahead of PS3 that people claimed. So I was always against this you get what you pay for bullshit argument people used back then. Everything PS4 improved over PS3 in terms of online functionality were things that would have happened if the service remained free.
I already edited that mistake thanks to you. Sorry about that.
I think I'm old enough, I play games since the Atari, having bought every console since the SNES (and PC).
No, the question has always been that why do you have to pay on consoles for a service that is worse than on PC, despite the PC service being free. Heck, it says so on the OP.
Now lets be honest, the real answer to "why doesnt Steam charge you for online" is not "beccause it takes 30%", the answer is "Because they cannot":
Of the 5 current big gaming platforms (the big 3 consoles, PC, and mobile (lumped iOS and Android together), only the 3 console manufactures charge you for online play. All of them take mostly the same 30% cut for digital (and different takes on physical) that was popularised by Apple with iTunes.
Why dont the other services not charge? Because they have actual competition inside their platform (iOS not so much but they are more interested on charging you premium for their ecosystem).
Now lets see onto reasons why charging for current service is BS (because they provide the same service free of charge in occassions):
-MS provides their same services on PC free of charge, despite charging on consoles.
-Sony provides their service free of charge for F2P games (and subscription MMOs), despite other experience for games you bought not being free.
-Nintendo provides the same service now that one year ago, despite now forcing you to pay for it, and the online experience being somehow worse than their previous console! (well, cloud saves are new I guess)
Now lets see more in depth of the cost and why 60$ a year is quite a bit of money:
-The first point is that it simply is nearly 1 AAA game at launch year. The average attach rate for consoles tends to be lower than 10 (games sold / console sold), so even if you only buy 2 years of PS+, that would be nearly 20% of the equivalent cost of the attach rate.
-The equivalent of 60$ a year as third party content sold in their store is 200$. You are not buying 200$ on Android / iOS / Steam to get the free service.
I pay for Nintendo Online, do I like it? NO. Do I have a choice? NO
Why does only charge me for Nintendo Online? BECAUSE THEY CAN AND IT IS EXTRA MONEY FOR THEM.
That is not to say that Live when it launched was an amazing breathtaking system that united many functions that were separate services on PC onto only one with good connection to games, but it has been greatly outshined by newer, better services.
1 - You're mistaken. Xbox Live Gold has never been free. It was a paid service even back in gen 6.
2 - The OG Xbox doesn't have cross game party chat. The OS level Live awareness came with the 360. Every gen 6 console could have had what OG Xbox did, because it was purely a service level implementation at that point. Which leads on to....
3 - No. I'm saying that PS3 was roughly on par with OG Xbox when it came to online functionality. It was similar it that it had voice comms, messaging, overarching user accounts, Halo 2-esque matchmaking, etc... but it didn't support cross game chat for the same reason OG Xbox didn't, because the OS itself didn't accommodate for it. This is what I mean by it not being a power issue.
4 - I'm actually not arguing that we should be paying to play online today. I actually think it's a matter of time before paid online comes to an end, because as the services grow beyond the consoles themselves, the fee becomes more questionable to the average consumers as they begin to interact with others in the same games that aren't paying it. I'm describing why people were willing to pay the fee at a time where the idea of paying for an online gaming service wasn't standard. It happened because none of the free options were comparable.
5 - As of the time XBL launched, no... online wasn't better than Nintendo today. Nintendo is laughed at for stuff like friend codes, needing a separate phone app or discord to voice chat, having an inconsistent featureset across games, etc. All of that and more was an issue even on PC before Live. Nintendo today at least can show you if your friend is online and playing Splatoon whilst you're playing Breath of the Wild. Simple shit like that was absent in online gaming at the time.
6 - Being fine with a lesser service is ok. Doesn't make the service itself any better. And it's used by far more people than you thinking across PC and console because...
7 - Even games that have no online gameplay components AT ALL are unified by the features Xbox Live standardised. People chat with friends whilst playing single player games. They receive invite to games and party chat because someone else sees their online status regardless of what they're playing. I'd know if you jump on Hearthstone (and may decide to join you) even if I'm on Steam playing something else, because Steam will tell me you are, despite it not even being a Steam game. That's the point of these things being standard... your online presence doesn't require each game to do anything special, it just works now.
I forgot to mention i have ps vita / ps3/ ps4, and ps4 is my main console, so PS + has a great value for me.
It actually was ahead - PS3 often had dedicated servers (in the beginning).
Was online on the PS3 actually not great? I always thought this was just some narrative from Xbox fans to justify paying for Live. I remember playing Street Fighter IV and Blazblue 10 years ago almost perfectly on the PS3. Granted I played Xbox Live maybe once before so I don't have any point of comparison.
I don't think my worldview is that warped.
Taxpayers pay for roads and bridges so that business can be conducted. By your logic, the businesses should pay for the infrastructure that they use. While many do pay taxes, quite a few larger businesses get huge tax breaks in order to entice them to move/stay...so they are not actually paying for the infrastructure that they use. But since we've already established a system where taxpayers foot the bill, it's going to be impossible to convince businesses that they should pay a fair share for it instead.
I already explained why Xbox Live cost money back when it was established in 2002. I also admitted that it probably doesn't need to cost 60 bucks in 2019. But if platform holders tried to shift the costs onto developers now, what do you think would happen? I'm pretty sure you'd see most console games become single-player/offline affairs, and that's assuming that developers even kept releasing on console rather than jumping ship to PC.
Before Xbox Live launched in 2002, barely any games had online features. By the time 360 launched, you were already starting to see a ton more games with online features. By the time the generation was over, almost all games on 360/PS3 had online features. And I'm sure that you remember how primitive PSN was at PS3's launch. By the end of the generation, they'd adopted so many of XBL's features. Standards were set and became universal across two platforms. You don't call that a revolution? I do.
It's not that simple, because ALL PS/XB games with online features utilize PSN/XBL features in some way, even if it's just for authentication and nothing else. That's the nature of a closed platform; everything has to go through their walled gardens.
On PC, Steam has definitely made an impact by offering many of the services that XBL/PSN offer to both devs and gamers for no additional cost beyond their 30% cut. On mobile, Google and Apple have chosen to do that too (although Apple does charge an extra $100/year), probably to increase the pace of adoption and sales. But on PC outside of Steam, all devs have had to run their own servers to provide these features. I can still play Ridge Racer 6 (from 2005) on 360 online because Namco hasn't had to pay to run their own servers. All of the non-EA X360 launch games are still online. Steam didn't offer all of these features in 2005, nor had it been widely adopted yet. How many PC games from 2005 are still online?
Its all bullshit. There was a time I protested it and stood firm, but alas that is nearly gone.
PS+ *free games & discounts have eased the pain. I'm still very salty about it now thinking about it.
The funnest part of reading your post is thinking about how Nintendo still has not even managed to come up to par with the initial Xbox Live in 2002 ...
16 years ago...
...A service older than some ERA members lolol
PS+ *free games & discounts have eased the pain. I'm still very salty about it now thinking about it.
The funnest part of reading your post is thinking about how Nintendo still has not even managed to come up to par with the initial Xbox Live in 2002 ...
16 years ago...
...A service older than some ERA members lolol
i'm paying for N online. I hate you all. ugh
PSN was pretty good only in the latter years. IRRC Initially it was really barebones but constant updates over the years made made it closer and closer to XBL while being free.
Personally, i think the latter years of PSN were better than XBL because it was free. I eventually stopped paying for XBL because of it. Also had PS Home (i think was the name) free with it.
In retrospect, this is why competition was pretty great in this respect. PS+ edged up on XBL with the *free games and eventually MS responded with GWG
Nintendo is also still behind PSN early days lolol
Of course we have to pay for online! Companies like Microsoft have very limited resources and it costs money for them to run these services for us! It's not like they have millions upon millions of dollars to throw around all willy nilly.