Microsoft: we won’t abolish Live fees - charges remain !!!

[Sansui]

BenKenobi88 said:

Sansui said:
Um... maybe to SOME of you pc gaming online is free, but have you ever been the one shelling out for the dedicated servers and voice chat servers?

There's a lot of generous people that offer their servers up for public play, or mooch off a university network or other workplace network where they have connections and no culpability.

There's the cost of the hardware to run those servers and the cost of bandwidth, and the cost of time for update and administration of those servers if you do it yourself.

At one point back in the day I was shelling out 180/month for a server + voice chat server for my team. I wish Live was free too, but I pay less than 4 bucks a month for what I consider reasonable enough quality of service to pay a whopping 4 bucks.

This is true, but at least you own your server and can do with it what you please in that case.

I've thought about getting a few of my friends and starting a TF2 server, we've got available hardware, a T1 connection available...but we're fine on public servers, as are most players...your average PC gamer isn't going to pay for a server.

This is true.  Having your own server and being able to do whatever you want with it is nice :)  But the real point is that there are still costs in PC gaming.... it's just most people never see it because there's a smaller number of people who pay a *whole* lot more (as in my case, 180/month) or mooch off of university/work connections who unintentionally foot the bill.