i always thought these subscriptions are a way to keep console prices cheaper than PC. People are usually much more tolerant to paying a "smaller" base price + an "optional" subscription VS paying for the full price that would give significant profit tot he company
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
The delusion that paying for PS+ and XBL pays for multiplayer servers. Why do people still believe this shit?
- Thread starter jett
- Start date
I thought we were paying Nintendo online because the Mario franchise is dying after March 31st and Mario didn't saves his coins for his 401k.
Reading more of the replies and I'm kind of dumbfounded. It's fine to want online play for free, but to make that argument based on the false, uneducated idea that the money made through these services is pure profit and not also being invested into a complex workstream that helps evolve and maintain that service is just the height of ignorance.
I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the money paid for PS+ and XBL doesn't, at least in small part, go to multiplayer servers. What people should be discussing is the value of these services. I absolutely believe that online play should be free, but I also believe that there is still value in the service.
I suppose for me I've always treated and justified the cost of Xbox Live as the service fee I pay to either gain access to or fund all of the below in some way:
I suppose for me I've always treated and justified the cost of Xbox Live as the service fee I pay to either gain access to or fund all of the below in some way:
- 'Free' games through Games with Gold
- Discounts
- Xbox backwards capability program (including One X and Series X enhancements)
- A unified system across the Xbox platform, including cloud saves, achievements, chat, etc.
That sort of exemplifies why launchers on PC are often seen as separate platforms. I mostly only use Steam these days but if I want to play something that's not on there I need to go elsewhere - that could be a different launcher on the same machine or somewhere else that isn't, such as when I want to play something that's on a console.
Steam does it for free because it holds a practical monopoly on PC sales and has for 15 years. It's not exactly right to compare them to the console pubs because it wasn't until this past year that console digital sales started approaching 50%+
meanwhile, even the physical games you buy for the consoles utilize online services, from account management, friends, text and voice chat, etc etc. It's a large ecosystem that needs people to develop and maintain it. If it were truly "server-less" then you'd be able to play multiplayer even if Xbox live or PSN were down but you can't because all of that shit is interconnected to a larger infrastructure.
As long as a physical market exists where Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo do not get a retailers cut, you can expect to pay for online services. Steam has several years on them in terms of maturity and market share, where the revenue they get from steam is probably tens if not hundreds of millions more than what the console pubs get from store revenue
meanwhile, even the physical games you buy for the consoles utilize online services, from account management, friends, text and voice chat, etc etc. It's a large ecosystem that needs people to develop and maintain it. If it were truly "server-less" then you'd be able to play multiplayer even if Xbox live or PSN were down but you can't because all of that shit is interconnected to a larger infrastructure.
As long as a physical market exists where Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo do not get a retailers cut, you can expect to pay for online services. Steam has several years on them in terms of maturity and market share, where the revenue they get from steam is probably tens if not hundreds of millions more than what the console pubs get from store revenue
OG Xbox (god, I hate their naming).
Yeah, they added solid value that drew me in from the hassle of other platforms at the time and that's been aped across the board, since. IMO, still not aped as well, but enough that I ain't about to pay for it anymore.
Biggest BS fed to all of us.
If money was going how it would be, Halo 360 MP or Gravity Rush 2 wouldn't be taken offline.
If money was going how it would be, Halo 360 MP or Gravity Rush 2 wouldn't be taken offline.
The subscription is there to pay for the community features like voice chat, which are also paid for indirectly by customers on the PC, even if you use Teamspeak, Discord or Skype. However, it would still be much fairer if the subscriptions enabled the online features and didn't restrict the games to go online.
People often say Steam does stuff for free, but that community storefront of theirs makes mad bank. You are indirectly paying for their services by buying & selling virtual hats off of other people.
I pay more for the monthly free games. Actually shouldn't say it's free since it's part of a paid service...
Multiplayer really should be free.
Multiplayer really should be free.
This is one of those rare instances where I don't even blame the bullshit on the companies. The consumers adapted this model with open arms back in 360 days (partly even back in OG Xbox days around Halo 2) and it was easy for Sony and Nintendo to follow suit.
It would be incredibly bad business decision not to exploit such massive, constant revenue that has been greenlit by the people buying your product. If people back then when it was still small potatoes refused to pay we would have free online MP to this day.
Steam wasn't charging for anything before all the hats stuff anyway.
Steam's services were also much more limited before all the hats stuff as well, and typically relying on third party dedicated servers for multiplayer instead of the relay systems they have now. Funny that.
They do it because they can, that's all. You don't have a choice since consoles are locked ecosytems.
People are dumb and anything to defend their preferred brand or box. It's literally video game politics.
It still shocks me people believe this stuff. When 360 had paid online and ps3 didn't, people would act like they were paying for servers and were getting a better online because they paid. But even then paying for online was bullshit and it only got more bullshit as the years passed.
If you want to claim that the sub fees pay for the upkeep then yeah, I mean they do, the same way that Ms and Sony taking a 30% cut on every game sold does the same exact thing. If you want to claim it pays for console subsidising, again the same way that the 30% game cut does....it isn't like online subscriptions money is put into a separate pot of money these companies make and is only used for online service upkeep...
These companies make a lot of money, Microsoft spent years of the xbox one generation bragging about it's azure cloud and yet you're telling me their trillion dollar company can't afford to run xbox live on their own servers for free while also taking a 30% cut of every game, dlc and microtransaction sold? Oh and let's not forget the ads for random ass products I seemingly get every week on my xbox that aren't actually xbox games.
Also people acting like somehow steam selling hats etc is how it manages to offer online servers and online communities etc for free.....how does ubisoft, ea, blizzard, epic etc do it then? They sure as shit aren't charging pc players for the right to play their games online on top of the in game stuff they sell......let's not act like pc gaming with it's free online for everything basically other than MMOs is just all run by valve.
If you want to claim that the sub fees pay for the upkeep then yeah, I mean they do, the same way that Ms and Sony taking a 30% cut on every game sold does the same exact thing. If you want to claim it pays for console subsidising, again the same way that the 30% game cut does....it isn't like online subscriptions money is put into a separate pot of money these companies make and is only used for online service upkeep...
These companies make a lot of money, Microsoft spent years of the xbox one generation bragging about it's azure cloud and yet you're telling me their trillion dollar company can't afford to run xbox live on their own servers for free while also taking a 30% cut of every game, dlc and microtransaction sold? Oh and let's not forget the ads for random ass products I seemingly get every week on my xbox that aren't actually xbox games.
Also people acting like somehow steam selling hats etc is how it manages to offer online servers and online communities etc for free.....how does ubisoft, ea, blizzard, epic etc do it then? They sure as shit aren't charging pc players for the right to play their games online on top of the in game stuff they sell......let's not act like pc gaming with it's free online for everything basically other than MMOs is just all run by valve.
Didn't Microsoft heavily advertise Xbox's advantage of dedicated servers around 2013-2014?
www.polygon.com
If you don't carefully read what they meant, a lot of people last gen were claiming the Xbox had universal dedicated server support not Found on other platforms.
Xbox One will have dedicated servers available for multiplayer games
Microsoft's next-gen console, Xbox One, will have dedicated servers available for all multiplayer titles, a Microsoft representative confirmed to Polygon today. According to the representative,...
www.polygon.com
If you don't carefully read what they meant, a lot of people last gen were claiming the Xbox had universal dedicated server support not Found on other platforms.
MS and Sony have other revenue streams as well. Point still stands that none of the Steam services have ever been behind a pay wall for the end user.
Isn't getting 30% of every game sale / transaction (?) just because not enough? nor having ads on the consoles stores or the like, are platform owners even in charge of anything that has to do with the mp portion of a game or is it all on the devs / publishers, there is no need to think on the poor poor companies, for all we know they could be selling players info / behavior to big devs and we are paying them for that.
Exactly. People have jobs and get paid to work on these services.
Paying for multiplayer is a turn-off for me and I don't do it, but even I can acknowledge that it's obviously a service with a value proposition attached to it, just like buying anything from any company.
You are arguing against a specific business model. That's fine. If in your opinion, a platform should charge more/less for some things, that's totally valid. But that doesn't mean there's zero cost to running the multiplayer ecosystems/services that we are talking about.
Two different arguments.
It's royalties because they are closed platforms. Low entry point closed platforms. Of course, nothing beat Apple with extremely high entry point but still royalties everywhere.
And I knew that was one of the manufacturer argument back in the day, but I didn't knew some people genuinely believed it was the real reason.
And I knew that was one of the manufacturer argument back in the day, but I didn't knew some people genuinely believed it was the real reason.
I mean, Halo 360 MP sucks but it's clearly an Xbox outlier with an obvious replacement.
Part of their 30% cut is supposed to be what covers the cost of that.
The infrastructure for enabling games to be played online on their console is controlled by the platform holder. That is not an easy or cheap thing to maintain when you consider these services need to be run healthily 24/7.
The developers are responsible for allocation of servers, even first party developers have to factor that into their budgets, but the actual services that these games use to connect players are run by the platform holder. That backend service that facilitates that is essentially what you're paying for.
Security, moderation, user data management, I could go on - there's a large number of workstreams involved in maintaining these services at scale. Obviously they're making plenty of profit, but the idea that it's inexpensive to run is nonsensical.
As for whether the money they make on software sales is "enough", enough means different things to different companies so you'll have to ask them lol. Ultimately, while in an ideal world they would be free to use, the money they are making is also being invested back into the service so there is still a net benefit for consumers.
And no, they are not selling your user data to developers.
Supposed to according to who?
At least on xbox, games from like 2006 still have their servers running and if i remember right, it looks like Xbox Live has a native matchmaking system on it, not like steam/PSN. Some time ago the street fighter anniversary collection had a matchmaking problem that wasn't present on xbox version because of this.
- Note: The Xbox One version of Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection currently uses Microsoft's system for optimizing matchmaking for users with strong signals. Therefore, a matchmaking filter was not implemented.
Everyone with a brain knows it cost money to run anything but instead of using some of their revenue / profits to do it themselves they realized they can completely charge that to the users like if they are some sort of indie on kickstarter that are running tight on money otherwise we wouldn't be able to play while also making easy money from it .
Do these costs vanish on PC? You can play the same online MS games on PC for free that you have to pay for on a console.
Are you trying to imply that PS+ is required to buy games on the PSN store?
This idea came from the early Xbox Live Gold days when the overall experience on Xbox consoles was better than PlayStation or Nintendo consoles.
I mean do you remember this nasty logo?
If so, congratulations. You've experienced online gaming hell.
Add that to PlayStation servers shutting down left and right, and Xbox servers staying up, and you have some folks expecting PS+ to solve all PlayStation online vows.
Now we just love the idea of having subscription services leeching like a slug.
I mean do you remember this nasty logo?
If so, congratulations. You've experienced online gaming hell.
Add that to PlayStation servers shutting down left and right, and Xbox servers staying up, and you have some folks expecting PS+ to solve all PlayStation online vows.
Now we just love the idea of having subscription services leeching like a slug.
most multiplayer games use p2p networks so there are no dedicated servers for matches. The belief that it pays for dedicated servers doesn't explain how PC games get the same services for free. So anyone who believes this is an idiot.
So what you're argument boils down to is that you've decided they make enough money and so they're out of line for providing consumers are service and having the audacity to charge for use of that service.
Understood. There's not really much for us to discuss here then.
No. What gave you that idea?
They don't vanish on PC, no.
Okay. It doesn't explain the rest of my previous comment. The same account is used on Xbox console and Windows. Why are they charging on a console and not PC?
That was also before Steam opened up to the amount of games it has now either. Steam makes a lot more money on just game sales than they did in 2010 when they started selling hats. Coincidentally, Sony and MS both have huge digital marketplaces on PS4/XB1 that didn't exist previously that are also huge new revenue streams.
Lol, yes, I know the whole idea for modern humans is to make more money but it would be nice not being squeezed from big corporations left and right just because, specially on a pandemic that took the jobs of so many, including myself, and worse yet having people defending them online for free like if they need our full love and support. You are completely right not much to discuss here, me trying to get some appreciation as a consumer and you defending big corps.
The PS3's online was worse than XBL. There's no way they could have charged for it.