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

[Alby_da_Wolf]

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.

As I wrote in the first part you answered, I don't pretend to get for free expensive online services, but just basic online multiplayer, the P2P one, that requires little to no effort at all from publishers' servers. If the server is hosted on the players' consoles or PCs themselves, why on earth should they pay a fee for it?

And about the second part, making people pay also for basic online multiplayer is a business model followed only by a minority of gaming enterprises, if the majority is fine with making pay only for premium features, it's just the natural way of things that majority will prevail. Boasting the approval of large, but minority, gaming communities, won't make them become the absolute majority.