Alby_da_Wolf said:
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.
We don't know exactly how expensive it is to operate. If you can find exactly how much it cost to provide that for millions of people, I'd be curious to see. Even if its not incredibly expensive to offer online play, Xbox Live is not an expensive service to begin with. If you drop $60 for a year it comes down to $5 a month.
I'm a computer technician but I don't much care for online gaming on the PC. The Xbox 360 commnuity has a different appeal, I often play online games not on the PC, and I like the unified network. Frankly, I don't care if I'm fully exploiting the service. It only comes down to a few bucks a month and its worth that to me. I don't fully exploit anything I pay for, but I don't lose sleep over it.
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.
You're kinda just babbling... none of this matters.
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