By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
JaggedSac on 03 December 2009
Edit Thread
vlad321 said:

I fully agree with you, however on the point of it stopping sales and affecting microsoft I doubt that it actually does that. Console players DO have simpler and lower expectations and as far as they know LIVE is worth every dime. I've been saying that forever now.

I remember when I first saw LIVE come out I was intrigued, then I heard it charged for multiplayer and I honestly couldn't stop laughing my ass off. Recently my mom wanted to buy my brother a 360 and she didn't know about the LIVE fee, I told her, SHE laughed her ass off. My brother did too when I told him.

Now to my point, I think the problem is that people just don't know any better so they honestly don't mind bending over and taking the MS stick fully and happily. The PS3's service is quite similar (at least from a PC-player point o view) and it is free, so there must be something else. Also you forgot that yes the console also does indeed cost 100 less, but also doesn't have a BluRay player, so if you evaluate that at a measly 50 that means just buying a 360 and signing up for LIVE, you might as well have bought a PS3.

However why don't people just by PS3's? Because corporations spend millions on sociology and psychology to advertise and market and make sure all their customers are ignorant and uneducated, then they are willing to buy anything. I think that is what we're seeing here (also true with people buying crappy games non-stop, but that's a different topic).


@Jereel
LIVE offers what Steam offers in terms of gaming with maybe a few bells and whistles and absolutely infinitely more content through my web browser. MMO games are actually games supporting THOUSANDS of player at the same time interacting, imagine a Halo where you have 200 people on a single huge map and everything done is handled by servers.

 

@Jagged

Steam does the whole "millions of players online and installing/searching for games" already for free. Magically LIVE doesn't. Explain how.

No, you are wrong.  It has a server list for each game that it provides, and most of the time the game itself provides the list.  It basically just launches and validates games.  Other than that there are no code level features that Steam provides developers.  Steam itself does not provide servers for any games other than possibly Valve ones.  Even then, the number of people playing at the same time is absolutely paltry compared to Live. CoD MW2 on Steam and Counter Strike, the two most popular games on Steam as of now, are currently having peak concurrent players at around 90k per day, and even less the day CoD came out.  Live had 2 MILLION CoD4 MW2 players playing concurrently the day it came out.  Steam is a great source of digital distribution, but as a gaming portal, it is just that, a portal.  It provides developers and customers no ubiqutous services between games.  It might have some hacked get around for friends lists and such, but it cannot provide the platform level of features that Live has.

It doesn't provide PC developers with a ubiqutous method for providing online play functionality.  It provides customers an easy way to browse server lists and download games.