Ideas for Xbox Live 3.0

[JaggedSac]

LOL, a bunch of lame comments. Free, free , free. Hell, I think the government should offer us free wireless broadband. The technology is there. Seems pretty simple. The thing is that for a console to have a decent online compenent it takes money to run. You need engineers on the payroll to watch the servers and you need developers to watch the service and you need tech support people. These people, let alone the hardware, cost money. On a pc it is much easier to have this infrastructure for online games. People can turn their systems into servers and host games. Console are much different in terms of the infrastructure needed. Having started online gaming with the Quake Beta I have an idea of how online gaming has progressed. One thing I find really nice about XBoxLive is the penetration of the headset. It is nice to play a game and be able to strategize with people(this is impossible on Wii). With Halo 3 me and my buds have a hell of a time keeping each other informed as to where people are. PCs have this ability but most people who play dont have it. There might be one guy in a match talking to his team but gets no responses. Also, having a badass infrastructure like XBoxLive's can greatly increase the abilities of developers to add value to games. Look what Bungie did with Halo3. They are able to host a wide range of statistics and gameplay content for each gamer. Once you take a picture of a replay in game it gets immediately uploaded to Bungie.net. This relies heavily on the back-end that Microsoft provides. All I hear here is belly aching and possibly jealousy. I will gladly pay the money in order to keep the service that I use quite extensively. Also, it is not just client side that this service is handy. I am sure Microsoft provides an incredible API for developers to tap into to make online development easier. Paying makes sure there is quality across the board.