Why Steam is Awesome, and How You Can Make Live Free

[Mr Puggsly]

makingmusic476 said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

1) Having  to start paying for things that previously were free. Paying for optional premium features or for costly dedicated servers for massive persistent worlds is totally fine for me.

Lets bear in mind it isn't free to offer online play. EA already shut down several servers this gen. A benefit Live offers for developers and publishers is they take on the financial burdens of offering online play.

Frankly, I'm happier with paying for online on the entire 360 library vs paying for a single online game. That's just me, I like variety. Also, an annual Live subscription is much cheaper than WoW and most other pay to play games.

 

2) Well, we'll see, but it will take at least another two years. PS3 has been criticized for being too expensive, adding costs doesn't look a sensible solution to attract typical Sony users. This IMVHO, naturally. Anyway, should console gaming become more expensive than now, and without any other choice than paying for online, PC gaming would grow again in share.

Well I think Sony taught the industry to keep gaming consoles reasonably priced.

You can charge for crap like online play, hard drives, wifi adapters, etc. But keep the main unit reasonably priced and let people decide what else they want to pay for.

What.  The only reason it costs EA a significant amount of money for online play is because they host dedicated servers for all their sports titles.   This is why they are eventually shut down.  This is a non-factor for games that use a P2P network, which is why older games like the original Killzone still support online play to this day, even with a virtually non-existant playerbase.  There are literally no costs involved, as online play is handled entirely through consoles connecting directly through each other, as opposed to having to go through a server elsewhere.  It's much like bittorrent, in which there is no host for a file, rather users are leeching off of each other.

And Microsoft by no means "takes on the financial burdens of online play".  I'm not even sure where you could get such an idea from.  All they do is retain all information related to your online ID, and make it accessible for all games.  I suppose it saves developers the trouble of having to track such information themselves, but prior to such unified networks, they likely wouldn't have bothered with such things anyway.

Why else would EA be shutting down servers for online play even for titles that use XBL?  It's certainly not because Microsoft is providing the online service in place of EA.

EA is the only 3rd party that runs their own servers.

 

This is what MS told GamesRadar.com...

"So long as the expense of running servers and matchmaking systems has to be picked up by somebody, no online gaming service will ever be truly ‘free’. The cost of PSN and PC online gaming is typically picked up by developers and publishers. CoD4, for example, runs on similar systems on both console platforms, but is maintained by Microsoft on Live and by a dedicated third party company at Activision’s expense on PSN. Both play the same at your end and both work on a peer-to-peer system with a matchmaking layer to link players up, but on Live you pay for that layer, and on PSN they pay."

Apparently there is a financial burden and MS is taking it on.

http://www.gamesradar.com/xbox360/f/why-xbox-live-isnt-free/a-20080617101147502012/p-3