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

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Squilliam said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Squilliam 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?

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.

Why should people pay full price for a game after the development and marketing expenses have been more than covered? Why should they when there are a lot of games out there with a free to play system? Convince me that they shouldn't and you've convinced me noone should pay for Live.

Go in punishment behind the blackboard, I'd expect something better from you!    You perfectly know that paying for a game license or a fee for a publisher run game server is totally different from paying the publisher a fee for a distributed server purchased together with the game and actually run on the players' machines themselves. I wrote more than once that I don't object to pay full price (*) for licenses or publisher-run game servers and obviously they'll want a profit margin on them, I just don't want to pay for P2P multiplayer, unless I desire optional premium features. Obviously the optimal choice between P2P or publisher-run servers depends on the game and a flat fee to play every MMOG would be very favourable for a lot of gamers, but it isn't for gamers playing mostly P2P multiplayer. So, if I wasn't clear enough, I never meant that nobody should pay for Live Gold, I just don't find a honest deal to have to pay it if I'm only interested in P2P multiplayer, but I'd be more than glad to pay it if I liked fee-based MMOGs and Gold included one or more MMOGs I like, in that case it would be a very advantageous offer. But would third party fee-based MMOGs publishers find this deal advantageous?

Anyway, every deal is made by two complex parts, sellers with their products, costs and desired profits, buyers with their needs, tastes and desires, and the money they can and are willing to spend to satisfy them. Given the sellers' offers, buyers vote with their money, and XB360 market share and the part of them subscribing to Gold exactly reflect how the market accepts and likes MS model. And unless this model isn't forced on me too without any choice, I'm perfectly fine with people liking it and findinge the deal advantageous, I never wanted to demonstrate they shouldn't, it's actually only MS competitors' task to offer them a better deal, if they can.

(*) If full price is too much for me, I simply give up the advantage of playing the game when it's new and I wait for it to go budget, it's a honest deal, if I pay more I receive more and sooner, if I pay less, I'm served later (although often I actually receive more, a debugged game and some expansions included). I so love deep pocketed early adopters kindly indirectly financing saver gamers!   

I remember hearing from a network engineer how expensive content delivery networks can be. I remember also Sony making some little announcment that they were finally breaking even on PSN even though their network is less complicated from what I understand. I don't remember when it was. The thing people fail to understand IMO is that peer 2 peer only removes one of the several major costs which are incurred when operating a network on the scale of Live. Furthermore theres the assumption that cost is the only major reason why games are peer to peer on Xbox Live. There have been several examples of games which could have had servers to play such as Halo 3 and according to bungie they specifically chose peer 2 peer gameplay because it also represented several advantages, especially in matchmaking flexibility. Beyond this they have a lot more ongoing manpower costs as they employ a significant number just to moderate and maintain Xbox Live.

So yes they probably could have free 2 play on Xbox Live. However to do that they would have had to significantly slow down the rollout of new back end and front end services. Beyond this given the extremely large capital investment to create the Live we see today they probably do deserve a return on their investment if they can get it. It is fair enough that others go other routes for their online gaming because they have different ideas and objectives in mind. I don't pay for Live, I probably won't for a long time maybe once the next generation starts but to me if I played online it would be the best service for it because when it comes to playing games I would rather play with Tru Skill and skill rankings to ensure my noob ass doesn't get splattered all over Texas by some 16 year old with too much gaming time on his hands.

Good! This makes sense. The costs that engineer talked about, though, affect also the free versions of Sony and MS networks independently from whether they offer basic online multiplayer or not. Those costs are unavoidable, for at least two reasons: First, console users expect and pretend a hassle free experience, this extends also to network connection, so all this burden falls on the providers' shoulders, that in consoles are the manufacturers themselves. Second, console manufacturers want to keep total controlon their platforms, including net access, this has a huge cost.

MS model is a way to be sure the network part of the business is profitable too, other models are possible, most probably Sony model, given its big share in movie and multimedia market, allows it to replace the basic online multiplayer revenue it gives up with movies and other "classic" entertainment sales revenue.

I guess my "frugal" concept of online multiplayer can work well without risking to sink companies only on PC, because it's a platform not affected by default by those special and expensive needs of  both console producers and users. Valve model works too, but it's quite different too, as it has a very strong sales revenue. Successful MMOGs are furtherly different (and the annual fees of the pay ones are usually greater than XBL Gold subscription). Crappy MMOGs like FarmVille are able to profit from a small percent (but big as absolute number of users) share that pays for premium features on a huge total user base of which the vast majority plays for free, and strongly limiting costs giving each user a very small world (BTW not connected in real time with other players), relying on Facebook and other social networks, making deals with them and limiting the infrastructure costs making a lot of transactions not real time, but based on social networks messaging system (this way the whole gift sending part of the game requires them to manage some transactions per minute with each user instead of several transactions per second as it happens in real time worlds; and also the real time part about actually working on the virtual fields and farms is very slow, limiting transaction rate too).