I fully agree with you, however on the point of it stopping sales and affecting microsoft I doubt that it actually does that. Console players DO have simpler and lower expectations and as far as they know LIVE is worth every dime. I've been saying that forever now.

I remember when I first saw LIVE come out I was intrigued, then I heard it charged for multiplayer and I honestly couldn't stop laughing my ass off. Recently my mom wanted to buy my brother a 360 and she didn't know about the LIVE fee, I told her, SHE laughed her ass off. My brother did too when I told him.

Now to my point, I think the problem is that people just don't know any better so they honestly don't mind bending over and taking the MS stick fully and happily. The PS3's service is quite similar (at least from a PC-player point o view) and it is free, so there must be something else. Also you forgot that yes the console also does indeed cost 100 less, but also doesn't have a BluRay player, so if you evaluate that at a measly 50 that means just buying a 360 and signing up for LIVE, you might as well have bought a PS3.

However why don't people just by PS3's? Because corporations spend millions on sociology and psychology to advertise and market and make sure all their customers are ignorant and uneducated, then they are willing to buy anything. I think that is what we're seeing here (also true with people buying crappy games non-stop, but that's a different topic).


@Jereel
LIVE offers what Steam offers in terms of gaming with maybe a few bells and whistles and absolutely infinitely more content through my web browser. MMO games are actually games supporting THOUSANDS of player at the same time interacting, imagine a Halo where you have 200 people on a single huge map and everything done is handled by servers.

@Jagged

Steam does the whole "millions of players online and installing/searching for games" already for free. Magically LIVE doesn't. Explain how.

I fully agree with you, however on the point of it stopping sales and affecting microsoft I doubt that it actually does that. Console players DO have simpler and lower expectations and as far as they know LIVE is worth every dime. I've been saying that forever now.

I remember when I first saw LIVE come out I was intrigued, then I heard it charged for multiplayer and I honestly couldn't stop laughing my ass off. Recently my mom wanted to buy my brother a 360 and she didn't know about the LIVE fee, I told her, SHE laughed her ass off. My brother did too when I told him.

Now to my point, I think the problem is that people just don't know any better so they honestly don't mind bending over and taking the MS stick fully and happily. The PS3's service is quite similar (at least from a PC-player point o view) and it is free, so there must be something else. Also you forgot that yes the console also does indeed cost 100 less, but also doesn't have a BluRay player, so if you evaluate that at a measly 50 that means just buying a 360 and signing up for LIVE, you might as well have bought a PS3.

However why don't people just by PS3's? Because corporations spend millions on sociology and psychology to advertise and market and make sure all their customers are ignorant and uneducated, then they are willing to buy anything. I think that is what we're seeing here (also true with people buying crappy games non-stop, but that's a different topic).


@Jereel
LIVE offers what Steam offers in terms of gaming with maybe a few bells and whistles and absolutely infinitely more content through my web browser. MMO games are actually games supporting THOUSANDS of player at the same time interacting, imagine a Halo where you have 200 people on a single huge map and everything done is handled by servers.

@Jagged

Steam does the whole "millions of players online and installing/searching for games" already for free. Magically LIVE doesn't. Explain how.

Why Xbox Live Gold is not good value:

What are you really getting for 50 € a year? Microsoft doesn't provide dedicated servers for most or all games you can play online. So that's not what you're paying for. Instead, games are hosted by one of the players, with Microsoft's servers just providing the service of connecting you to other available players. But this matchmaking service is trivial to implement, requiring at most a few servers per game, as it's only invoked when starting up a match.

So what are you paying for, really, when you spend the 50 € a year? Certainly not for the privilege of all the online content, as Silver users can also access it, and the servers hosting this online content should be paid for from the money you pay for the content. Serving files online is very cheap, less than $0.1 per GB in fact. Free demos can be considered a part of marketing done for publishers on behalf of Microsoft. Given how cheap it is, it should be more than covered by royalties that MS charges publishers.

So in conclusion, Microsoft is not charging you for Live Gold because it has to. The minimal services provided by their system are either cheap to provide or should be funded by other sources. They're charging you because they can.

But can they? That's my second point... I believe a large part of why the PS3 is outselling the 360 is due to having free online. Yeah, the PS3 is around $100 more expensive than the 360, but after two years of paying for Live Gold the 360 will have cost the same, and more if you keep playing for 3 years or more. In this economy, who doesn't expect their new console to last for more than 2 years?

For me, it doesn't affect me much as I prefer to do my online gaming on the PC which is all around better, with the biggest advantage being that you're actually playing on a dedicated server which allows for a bigger number of players with less lag and more fairness among players. I bought the 360 for its single-player games.

But if in the next gen I do want a console to play online, I will certainly not go with the one that charges me for it, without giving me corresponding service back. As much as I dislike Sony, in that situation I might actually consider buying their system. I suspect many people are thinking that right now, which is why the 360 can't compete against the PS3 properly at the current prices.

No, you are wrong.  It has a server list for each game that it provides, and most of the time the game itself provides the list.  It basically just launches and validates games.  Other than that there are no code level features that Steam provides developers.  Steam itself does not provide servers for any games other than possibly Valve ones.  Even then, the number of people playing at the same time is absolutely paltry compared to Live. CoD MW2 on Steam and Counter Strike, the two most popular games on Steam as of now, are currently having peak concurrent players at around 90k per day, and even less the day CoD came out.  Live had 2 MILLION CoD4 MW2 players playing concurrently the day it came out.  Steam is a great source of digital distribution, but as a gaming portal, it is just that, a portal.  It provides developers and customers no ubiqutous services between games.  It might have some hacked get around for friends lists and such, but it cannot provide the platform level of features that Live has.

It doesn't provide PC developers with a ubiqutous method for providing online play functionality.  It provides customers an easy way to browse server lists and download games.

So I ask, does LIVE actually provide the servers? Are those L4D2 servers Valve's or are they Microsoft's? Also you have to realize that there are many many more gamers that don't even TOUCH on steam to play their online games just fine. Also, the server browse lsists are easily fixed by a Master List Server which is actually quite simple to run since all they do is store data of servers other people out there have. Also I don't know how much simpler you want as an end-user than to click multiplayer and click browser and click on a game. Like... does LIVE also wipe your ass in the process? Cause I must have missed that feature. For easy download, get Steam.