vlad321 said:
That's what makes it more interesting. They don't charge for a lot of their own content (i know i know, gears of war etc, but it's true in some cases) yet they make others (like Valve) charge for their content. How does that not seem fucked up to anyone else? As for bandwidth usage, has no one realized that you already pay for the bandwidth? That's your ISP handling YOUR bandwidth, MS just stuck their LIVE service in there so they can use an excuse to charge you fo THEIR bandwidth too. Has no one wondered how GameSpy and Heat.net (which was later bought by gamespy) work just fine, and support so many multiplayer games, without making you pay for them?
@Zizzla Did you honestly call PC gamers less hardcore than Xbox gamers? PLease, don't even start. COnsole gamers don't know a good game if it hit them in the face and claim such "ezmode" games such as Halo to be hardcore. The reason they can't play on the PC is because they can't even bother to make a few settings about their games so they have to settle for a half-assed substitute, which is what the 360 is, a half-assed PC with half-assed games and half-assed "harcore" players. |
That is a different beast. They rely mostly on private servers provided by the consumers for their games. The only thing that they really provide is a master server that has a list of all available servers for all games. Live servers actually have to handle the matchmaking requests for all games that utilize matchmaking. Which is much more involved than providing a simple server list. Take Quake Live as an example of a similar situation. They are now having to offer a premium membership in order to not eat server costs. This is due to the fact that all of the servers for the game are provided by id and the fact that their ad based model is not working well for them. They are not getting any game purchase fees so there is nothing directly paying for the server costs. This is very similar to Live in the fact that there is no direct compensation for their servers from game sales. This is why they charge for Live. You could say that DD sales would pay for that, and they could, but MS obviously does not want the profits from DD to pay for their server upkeep. I do not mind paying because I tend to enjoy the whole matchmaking/ranking services that they offer through Live.
As for your pc gaming statements. You are completely absurd in your attempts to describe something as hardcore. I grew up playing Doom, Quake(hell, I played the orginal TF mod), Quake 2(BoTS mod, $10 bucks to anybody who knows what that is), Tribes, UT, etc. The gameplay is just different. Sure the input offers more precise aiming. But the only thing that means is that developers must make character movement faster because it is so damn easy to shoot people. I have already had discussions with you on this, and you obviously have a close minded approach to any of your ideals. I garauntee you without a shadow of a fucking doubt, that if you played a Halo 3 MLG player, you would get your ass pwned. Heck, I even remember Mendicate Bias challenging you to a match of Halo on PC, and he loves both pc gaming and console gaming, much like myself. Whatever happened with that?
You have a screwed up mindset. Hell, you think you have the right to play any game ever released for free and then you might offer your support to the developer as charity. That is retarded. Especially considering you want to become a game developer yourself. The sweetest irony would be if a game you developed flopped due to massive piracy and you get canned. It would be the sweetest justice ever.
