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

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Mr Puggsly said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

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?

1) That's the great thing... you DON'T have to pay for it. Just play a different console or the PC.

You've become accustomed to online play being free regardless of the financial burdens of the people who offer the service. Fortunately, there are options for people like you.

I don't know your financial situation, but $60 a year isn't really setting me back much and I get a lot of entertainment from Live I can't get elsewhere. It basically pays for it self with all the Deals of the Week I take advantage of as well.

 

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.

2) Perhaps its the minority, but financially its the most successful.

I hardly feel like a minority paying for Live considering its considerably more active than PSN. Also, I'm in the US which is where the 360 is going pretty strong.

1) Luckily yes, anyway, if I play free P2P I don't pretend to get expensive services from the publisher, even fan sites with links to join games being played can do. And actually it's not the $50-60 to pay that bugs me, it's the fact that on XBox there is no other choice than changing platform. But as I still prefer PC, this issue doesn't really affect me, unless it is extended to other consoles, as I think that sooner or later I could buy a Wii. Actually, another thing that could bug me if I paid a fee, is that my internet connection is quite shaky, so I wouldn't fully exploit what I payed for.

2) If we consider just consoles, it's the most successful, and it has also the financial majority of online revenue, yes, I'm aware of this. On consoles it's a minority just as number of players, but a big and healthy one. I actually meant a minority both as number of players and as revenue including PC too. Quite obviously, if MS is happy with having the most profitable console online service and it doesn't want the numerical majority of users too, Gold is still the solution, my point is only that the numerical majority favours services that get their revenue from selling games and premium services, not basic services too. About this particular issue fact is that they exist two different relevant majorities, depending on whether MS wants to get for its service maximum profit margin (and maximum profit too if we consider consoles only) or if it wants to attract the majorty of users. Maybe I tend to attribute the latter approach to MS because I forget that after becoming sure that Sony wouldn't have conquered the majority of gaming market and grabbed the living room computing market, MS quite changed its behaviour, favouring more profit margin than increasing market share and stopping Sony at any cost.