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SvennoJ on 11 June 2013
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Adinnieken said:
michael_stutzer said:


It is because of clueless people who chose to buy 360 when it introduced paywall. If people stopped buying 360s when there was a free alternative, none of this would happen. Blame yourself.

I had a problem with paid multiplayer and still have. Stop with these stupid posts. Show me examples of people who said "I'll never pay for online, never." and now saying "paid multiplayer is great!".

You're a fool if you believe that.

Infrastructure costs money.  A LOT of money.  The costs to provide a service as big as and with the service level agreement that Xbox LIVE has is impossible without revenue and you can't get that through games.  Sony knows this.  That was the whole reason for offering PS+ in the first place, to create something people would subscribe to in order to generate revenue.

I've worked in a data center.  I know how much it costs to maintain thousands of servers, keep it cooled, and keep it powered.  I know the costs for bandwidth, which are not cheap.  All of this costs considerable money and if you don't think it does you're clueless.  If you think it can be made up in the sale of a game, you're clueless.  It isn't and it can't.  You have to have some substantial revenue in order to pay for it.

It's a bit of both really. People have started expecting more then simple p2p online play that Nintendo offers.
To stay competitive they need to keep up with Microsoft's infrastructure, and that costs a lot of money indeed.
Sony tried to pay for that by charging publishers bandwidth fees, and that led to less demos on psn.
Then online passes came about, nobody liked that.
ps+ was a good way to generate some revenue, but why get ps+ with a new system with no backlog. Any games put on ps+ the first year is going to cost a lot more then it has for ps3.

Steam online play is still free, yet they don't have the burden of R&D costs and subsidizing a console. Their cut on sales all goes to the infrastructure.
The WiiU is still free, I don't have experience with it other the Mii Plaza though. I don't have any multiplayer games for it yet.

It sucks, as it will lock me out of playing with friends that don't want to get ps+.
But I understand the money has to come from somewhere.

If it's a choice between 399 and paid online, or 499,- limited demos and online passes, then it's simple for me as I already enjoy the value of ps+. I do wish they would keep simple p2p online free, but I guess it's too much to ask from developers to put 2 forms of online play in each game.