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makingmusic476 on 05 December 2010
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Mr Puggsly said:
makingmusic476 said:

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

Ah, forgot about matchmaking.  That basically ties into providing IDs across all games.  It's a part of party chat, I suppose, given it facilitates joining a game alongisde your party.

However, matchmaking is a pretty small part of the overall online package, and it's not something all games support, nor is it something all games require.  Developers could easily get away without providing such a feature, and sometimes the addition of such a feature is actually met with disappointment, as seen with the outrage over Killzone 3 replacing traditional server lists from Killzone 2 with a matchmaking setup. It's one of those features that "prior to such unified networks, they likely wouldn't have bothered with" anyway, as I said before.

And despite Microsoft supporting developers with such a feature, it does little to ensure the continuation of online play, as shown through EA discontinuing online play for past XBL-enabled titles.