| nightsurge said: You actually just validated his comparison. "Every network has to charge in order to make money." Guess what. Xbox Live, PSN, Steam, etc are networks, networks and services. Steam doesn't charge because they make all their money selling games. PSN charges with PS+ because they realized they lost way too much money with a completely free service. Xbox Live charges because they know you need the income and can use that to make the best services/network available. His comparison works because there are extremely cheap or even free alternatives to using a phone/cell phone network. :) |
Well. Steam is a little different.
Valve has *some* servers which gives data to users, but a massive bulk of it is provided by internet providers that have their own CDN (Content Delivery Network) as it works out cheaper for internet providers to have that data already on it's network rather than retreiving it directly from Valve and hence using up costly bandwidth.
A good example of this is in Australia where pretty much every ISP has some servers for Steam data and all ISP's have peering arrangements over PIPE or WAIX or Internode CDN etc' where they can use each others Steam hosted data to deliver it to users cheaply, ultimatly saving a bucketload of cash.
Microsoft however uses Akamai for it's content delivery system, which generally isn't the cheapest alternative around, but they're large and is world-wide, hence why Microsoft probably feels inclined to buy allot of bandwidth then charge Xbox users for Live!
Sony also use the Akamai CDN, however if you use both services (Live and PSN) you can tell they're very different in performance, I would assume because Sony doesn't charge for PSN, they then buy a little less bandwidth to save a bit of money, bandwidth is actually very expensive afterall and can drive up costs for companies into the millions.
On the flip side, when an ISP wants to capture certain data packets that exists on the Akamai network, you need a very expensive piece of equipment, ISP's might want to capture the packets in order to cache it to save money and speed up transfers for users or make it data-free for people who are on data caps.
In the end, Valve/Steam, Microsoft/Xbox Live and the Sony/Playstation network have a very different setup when it comes to content delivery and are NOT comparable.
If anything, Steam/Valve have the superior implementation as there is allot more redundancy and bandwidth to go around.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
