I noticed that too. $35-60 a year is nothing to someone with a job. Maybe it might be to someone who has to ask their parents for money. 

Online wouldn't be worth payment to me. I do get very into some online games, but its not an all year thing (okay, three solid months of 2013 were taken up by MHTri U, most of that online, but still)

I do not have to big of a problem with Nintendo's online. I love thats its free I had a 360 last gen and oh my god was that thing a money hog. I had to send it in for repairs 3 times for the damned red ring bs and on top of that XBL.

The only thing I wish Nintendo would do is have like a party chat system where I can talk to my friends while I play.

The online is good, but it's limited

Or to those of us stuck in minimum wage jobs.

Microsoft intended the online game functionality to be a premium feature (like MMORPG fees) and Sony said (before the PS4 launched) that offering online for free was one of the biggest mistakes they made during the PS3 era because they could have earned alot of money.

Now they say stuff like "we cant afford free online anymore because of the massive server costs"

Guess what make games have player hosted servers as on PC and you would not have server costs at all.

Microsoft and Sony should let people play for free with their friends on servers they can host on their own and should keep the fee for people that care about online tournaments or leaderboard bullshit etc.

There is exactly 2 reasons for online fees. #1 Earning easy money and #2 having the possibility to shut down the old games servers when you want everyone to move on to the next installment of a game franchise. (#2 just happens occasionally but it does happen. Its not about doing all the time but about being able to do it and its about getting people used to official servers )

There is zero advantage and zero plausible reason for people to be forced to pay a fee to play with their friends. I know my friends dont cheat and If I want a 100% guaranteed cheat free game session I could still play on official servers and then pay a fee. Or play on community servers that also run anticheat software like on PC (this is also free!)

Online fees are a joke.



Btw   Games with Gold is kinda neat because you can  keep the games forever even if they are somewhat old.  But PSN+ is an ethical nightmare.  It plays with the human fear of loss  because the longer you have a subscription the more forced you feel to keep the subscription  because you lose more games the longer you are a PS+ member. Thats psychology 101 "how to make people addictive" (its the same principle mmorpgs work. The longer you play and the more you paid the harder it gets to stop playing.  You lose more the longer you play and you think "I cant stop now because everything would have been for nothing")

I feel if you dont have a job that pays enough or one at all, a little more focus should be on that than video games anyway. If you're not old enough to get a better job just ask for subscriptions for Christmas or your birthday. 

I'm no fan of PS plus even with the free games. This is mostly because I typically purchase games I want to play early and just because a game is free doesn't make me want to play it. All the "free" games I wanted to play are in my collection already.

To add, I bought 2 years of PS+ thanks to Killzone Shadowfall but I only played it for a month before getting sick of it. Haven't really played anything else on ps4 so it feels like my PS+ money is slowly burning. The updates and online storage are nice though.

Better job tends to be at least 18 months out in my case (lest i get really lucky next summer), though i concede the point that this whole affair is a luxury. Free is still more affordable, however, and as Sony demonstrated in the switchover to paid online, there is no point to paying.

I pay ps+ for the "free" games alone, does nintendo offers free games every month? wait a minute... didnt the online suck? i have a Wii and their shop is terrible, is it the same in the Wii U? if so they cant charge for such poor service, if the Wii U has the same services as the Wii they simple cant charge because the online is terrible. But I dont have a Wii U so i dont know.