Meh. Many services slowly increase in price over time. Its why we don't pay like 30 cents for a film ticket at the box office anymore.
Impulsivity said:
Somehow Sony manages, somehow steam manages, somehow the iphone/ipod touch manage, somehow the DS manages, somehow the Wii manages....etc etc
It is very clearly possible to not charge for online games and more then cover the costs of an online system with game and movie revenue. Microsoft doesn't because once they get you locked into a platform they milk you for all you're worth (for other examples see Office costing 500 dollars+ and Windows 7 costing over 300 dollars for a full version).
It should absolutely be free to play the games I PAID for. The payment for the online services should be included in the 60 dollars I pay for the game just as playing starcraft for years on battlenet was covered by buying starcraft at retail. |
Hit the nail right on the head.
The service still costs money. Its just a matter of who pays. In sony's model the developer pays for the servers. In steam the users (read gamers) pay to set up the dedicated serves. Someone pays, its just that Microsofts model requires the user to pay. You may not agree with their model but its obviously the most profitable model.
Different services simply charge different sections of the market.
| FaRmLaNd said: The service still costs money. Its just a matter of who pays. In sony's model the developer pays for the servers. In steam the users (read gamers) pay to set up the dedicated serves. Someone pays, its just that Microsofts model requires the user to pay. You may not agree with their model but its obviously the most profitable model. Different services simply charge different sections of the market. |
It's a crappy douchy model is what I'm saying. We ALREADY pay a TON for the games themselves with the 60 dollar price hike from 50 bucks. That should provide more then enough money to buy a few servers. Alternately it's not hard to let each 360 link together with one being a server plus client and the rest being clients. There are MANY free ways to do it.
They pick the monopolist choice though, the one where they exploit your hardware ownership and their closed system to squeeze every last penny they can out of you. They made about 200 million in their entertainment and devices devision and when they explained the results, surprise, most of the money they made was extorted from people who just want to play Gears of War 2 (which they paid for) online.
If you say about half of 360 owners pay for live and they pay an average of about 12 bucks a quarter (some get 30 dollar deals, some pay 7 or so monthly so it averages to that) that means almost all of the devisions profits are taken from the gamers that use live (240 million from even just 20 million live users).
That realization (the way they monopolize accessories is a second part of it) is what made me sell my 360. I divested my investment in 360 futures because I was sick of all the fees, basically. Ditto for paying for windows at 300 a pop to use it on my mac for boot camp (I mean I JUST bought Vista and now they want another 300 bucks to upgrade to Vista 2.0 a few years later when Apple only charges 1/10th that for their OS upgrade? No thanks).
The big guy skimming off the little guy for all of their profit 4 billion in profit, most if it gained through unfair and dishonest practices? It's official, Microsoft is the Goldman Sachs of video games.
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