Is paying $50 or less year for xbox live really that big of a deal??

[BenKenobi88]

JaggedSac said:

Lord N said:

jagenjg said:
Hey, XBL is cheaper than my GamyFly account (2 games out at once), and I bet the infrastructure for XBL is more expensive to run than GameFly. Those servers and bandwidth are not cheap for this stuff.

 

It truly astounds me that people are still under the belief that Microsoft is running a server for all of those games. Most of that stuff is handled through third-parties and P2P.

That $50 is nothing but revenue.

 

 

 

Actually, M$ stores a ton of data for each GamerTag.  All previous purchases, achievement info, friends lists, etc.  It all has to be housed somewhere and there has to be someone there for maintenence and updates.  I am not sure how they are storing downloadale content but I imagine they are doing it in house.  That means they probably have all the content stored in multiple places, so as to keep speeds up in different parts of the world.  Even if they are sing third parties to store their stuff, they have to pay them.

And yet Valve runs a massive digital distribution platform that surely takes up many times the bandwidth that XBL takes up and it's 100% free, run solely from profit from Valve games.

You don't think Microsoft could run XBL with their game profits?  Of course they can, but people call them M$ for a reason.