| FaRmLaNd said: The service still costs money. Its just a matter of who pays. In sony's model the developer pays for the servers. In steam the users (read gamers) pay to set up the dedicated serves. Someone pays, its just that Microsofts model requires the user to pay. You may not agree with their model but its obviously the most profitable model. Different services simply charge different sections of the market. |
It's a crappy douchy model is what I'm saying. We ALREADY pay a TON for the games themselves with the 60 dollar price hike from 50 bucks. That should provide more then enough money to buy a few servers. Alternately it's not hard to let each 360 link together with one being a server plus client and the rest being clients. There are MANY free ways to do it.
They pick the monopolist choice though, the one where they exploit your hardware ownership and their closed system to squeeze every last penny they can out of you. They made about 200 million in their entertainment and devices devision and when they explained the results, surprise, most of the money they made was extorted from people who just want to play Gears of War 2 (which they paid for) online.
If you say about half of 360 owners pay for live and they pay an average of about 12 bucks a quarter (some get 30 dollar deals, some pay 7 or so monthly so it averages to that) that means almost all of the devisions profits are taken from the gamers that use live (240 million from even just 20 million live users).
That realization (the way they monopolize accessories is a second part of it) is what made me sell my 360. I divested my investment in 360 futures because I was sick of all the fees, basically. Ditto for paying for windows at 300 a pop to use it on my mac for boot camp (I mean I JUST bought Vista and now they want another 300 bucks to upgrade to Vista 2.0 a few years later when Apple only charges 1/10th that for their OS upgrade? No thanks).
The big guy skimming off the little guy for all of their profit 4 billion in profit, most if it gained through unfair and dishonest practices? It's official, Microsoft is the Goldman Sachs of video games.
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
