| Mr Puggsly said: Amazing, you still just don't get it. The benefit for a lot of us it ability to play games we prefer. PS3 has a ton of online games I could play for free... but I'd rather spend my time playing something I enjoy. I don't know your financial situation, but $60 is not a lot of money to me for something I will use all year. "You're virtually buying the game and paying for a service that will not exist anymore in a few years. How you consider that money well spent is beyond me." I'm paying for entertainment now and its a relatively small amount. You ever go to the movie theater? You simply pay for entertainment for that moment. You ever eat out? Once again, you are just paying for a moment of entertainement. Some sort of fee is justified considering its not free to offer online services. For many years PSN was in the red. I presume PSN Plus is finally making PSN profitable. Its not a charity since I feel what I get from the service is worth what I pay. For someone who claims to care about how people spend their money... you sure care an awful lot. Anyhow, just bear in mind competition is a good thing. You think PSN would be as good without MS creating such a fantastic service? Its seems like almost everything Sony does is a response to Xbox. MS forces Sony to compete and make their service better. So even if you dislike MS, you atleast owe them thanks for making PSN great. |
To be fair about this, no $60 is not much money at all. It's small in comparison to what MMOs usually charge but then again that is for that game specifically whereas they update it heavily and run servers. As for XBL there is a shroud over the actual cost of them running their service, is it really justified? It'd be nice to know.
The real issue is that XBL could be free and you could still play Halo, Gears, and all that. Elmininating the fee won't cause it to come crashing down. Competitor services are operating just fine under a free model and there has been discussion among companies that free models should be the established model. If a game needs to charge a service fee to operate then by all means charge a service fee, but to charge a fee regardless of use and regardless of which companies utlize it, doesn't bode well with me. Are third parties even part of this fee? Do they receive any of that money? Do they use Microsoft's servers? If they don't then there is defentily something wrong with this model. I wouldn't be opposed to Microsoft charging a fee to play 1st party games online since those are their servers and such. If third parties are brought into the mix then I guess it is alright but they seem to operate just fine without a fee in the past and on other platforms, that goes for 1st party games too. This also is aside from the fact Mircosoft doesn't allow access to paid services without an XBL subscription. Do you think Netflix isn't using their own servers? Why should you have to pay twice? Access to those services should be free but instead Microsoft needs to gather some money from their consumers, because if they are just using their Xbox to watch movies they probably aren't buying many games. This just screams unethical.
Enjoy what Xbox offers and XBL but you should really know that your participation in their service fee isn't because of any added value or guarentee of your entertainment, you have no other choice if you want access to those games. It is exploitation and in line with Microsoft's monopolistic past. Don't view this as an attack. If I was really into those games, and I was really into Halo 2 back when, I would be paying the fee aswell but only because I didn't have a choice. Really what should come out of this is a more active attempt by Xbox consumers to change the industry model, at least be met half way by freeing up services like Netflix and the upcoming IE9.
So I have to ask you the question. If XBL went free tomorrow, how would you feel?
Before the PS3 everyone was nice to me :(
