Xbox Live Gold is not good value, and it is holding the 360 back

[NJ5]

JaggedSac said:

NJ5 said:

JaggedSac said:

@NJ5, what am I getting wrong about Steam?

I already posted a reply to one of your previous posts, but:

- it has friends lists, leaderboards, achievements and other community features like organizing events and groups.

- it has a SDK which includes matchmaking and lobby system (even if it doesn't have the servers, but on the other hand they don't charge licensing fees for Steamworks).

You seem to think that Steam is just a system for downloading games, which is completely wrong.

 

No, I know it offers those things.  But in order to use those, developers have to choose to integrate these into their titles.  This is why there is such a small subset of games on Steam that offer achievements, and I imagine and even smaller subset that offers matchmaking.  And this matchmaking that they speak of uses L4D as an example.  This is basically just finding a dedicated server with an empty spot for you, it doesn't take any sort of ranking into account.   With Live, it is integrated for them so ALL titles have the services/features.  Once again, ubiquity.

I think the point of comparing Steam to Live was to show that a free system can implement a lot of the features Live has. Not to prove there's an ubiquitous online system on the PC. That's a console thing which the 360 and PS3 do.

Here's the way I see it. When Xbox Live first appeared, it had value due to being the first online system of its kind on a console. Right now, the value it has is mostly for people whose friends are already on Xbox Live. I don't see a good reason other than that one to choose Xbox Live over the PSN (unless of course you are constrained to wanting a specific console, but there are good reasons to want either one so I'm ignoring that here).