Steam also supports matchmaking, providing the servers. Also how can you say developers foot the bill of dedicated servers? The players put up dedicated servers, not the companies.  And I understand ubiquity and that's the pro that LIVE has over anything on the PC. However in terms o helping developers (why are the most indie games on the PC, even ones with multiplayer?) or really, just about any measure, it falls really short. Don't even get me started on all the non-game features.

So really you pay 50 bucks for ubiquity and that's about it, nevermind the fact that said ubiquity doesn't really bring anything special either.

@NJ5, what am I getting wrong about Steam?

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.

And you've been wrong forever now. I think it's funny that you assume people willing to pay for products when others settle for what's free means THEY have the simpler expectations. Some of us want the best, and pay for it. Some people enjoy the console experience.

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.

Well, good for your family. I'm glad you got a good laugh out of it. I'm sure some people laughed when it was first suggested that the earth wasn't the center of the universe, or that tiny little organisms can make you sick, too. Ignorance is bliss. You all laughed at the idea of LIVE, but there's one thing you apparently didn't know back then - consoles had NOTABLY less lag in games than PC games. Due to every Xbox having the same network adapter and hardware, consoles on the same internet connection provided a better gaming experience. You got to use a mouse and keyboard? Great. We didn't have to shoot 2 feet in front of our targets to hit them. I'll take that any day.

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.

*facepalm* Yes, because clearly those are the only differences between the systems. There are a myriad advantages to the 360. Most people prefer the controller. How about the fact that it has both of this generations biggest HD exclusive franchises? How about because Xbox Live gets new features first? How about because Live gets more exclusive demos? How about because Xbox Live has a superior Netflix streaking setup? How about because Xbox Live has more of your friends playing? I could go on. In short, if you consider $4 a month to be "bending over and taking the stick," perhaps you'll feel differently when you have a real job, and view that amount for what it is - virtually nothing.

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).

Is that a joke? For nearly the first 2 years of the PS3's existance, it was inferior in every way to the 360. Multiplats ran and looked worse. It had less games, and PSN was a joke next to Xbox live. Actually, it was largely blind Sony fans than kept them afloat until the system became worth owning. Now it's a valid contender, but make no mistake, there were a lot of bitter PS2 fans who bought PS3s and wished they had gotten 360's. This is no longer an issue, but to even insinuate that it is MS that benefitted most from the ignorance of customers this generation... Well, that just shows your ignorance.


@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.

Live offers a great many bells and whistles. And yes, you can get more content through a web browser. So? I can get more content online than I can via cable, so is that robbing me too? But wait, I can get an older game for $10 that may have more content than a new game for  $60, I guess paying more is always wrong, because content is content, right?

And yes, I'm fully aware of what MMO games are capable of. But guess what? In a MMO game, what are people doing when they see 200 people? Sitting in a town, or an auction house? Raid  groups and PVP encounters (with only a VERY few exceptions) are typically much smaller affairs, with 10,25 or 40 players caps. And guess what? People generally have to use a solution like Team Speak or Ventrilo to connect with their friends. And if someone wants you to log online to play, even if you're at your computer, they need to use something like AIM to tell you to log on and play. Xbox live handles it all. MMORPGs generally have really poor voice chat integration, if it's even there at all. I guess Xbox has spoiled me on that one, but noone expects that in games on PC, players have "simpler and lower expectations."

@Jagged

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

I already posted a reply to one of your previous posts, but:

- it has friends lists, leaderboards, achievements and other community features like organizing events and groups.

- it has a SDK which includes matchmaking and lobby system (even if it doesn't have the servers, but on the other hand they don't charge licensing fees for Steamworks).

You seem to think that Steam is just a system for downloading games, which is completely wrong.

No, I know it offers those things.  But in order to use those, developers have to choose to integrate these into their titles.  This is why there is such a small subset of games on Steam that offer achievements, and I imagine and even smaller subset that offers matchmaking.  And this matchmaking that they speak of uses L4D as an example.  This is basically just finding a dedicated server with an empty spot for you, it doesn't take any sort of ranking into account.   With Live, it is integrated for them so ALL titles have the services/features.  Once again, ubiquity.

Paragraph by paragraph:

1- What separates my rant from past ones is that now we're at the point where the 360's online system makes it a more expensive alternative than the PS3. We're also at the point that this might be giving a visible edge in favor of the PS3.

2- I can afford it just fine. That doesn't mean I think it's worth it (see my previous post).

3- Whether Xbox Live is more stable than the PSN or not I don't know and is besides the point. I gather that the PSN does have dedicated servers for many games, and surely it could be improved if Sony charged for it.

4- Irrelevant.

Do you even realize that LIVE isn't the BEST at anything at all? If you do you are just deluding yourself.

Any one thing? No, probably not. Better overall than it's competitors? Yes.

Speaking of ignorance, I can't help but laugh at you thinking LIVE has less lag than PC games. You either know nothing or you just are one of the mos ignornat people I have seen when it comes to gaming who pretends to know something. I usually get less than 50ms lag in my games, wish there was any measure in our 360 other than bars to compare, but apparently if you go by MW2, full bars means you can have up to 200ms, talk about ignorant people on the 360s.

Reading comprehension has always been an issue for you, I should have expected this... Your comment referred to when Live first came out. And my statement clearly referenced back then. When you and your family were laughing about Live, it was the best way to play online. Clearly now, it's much less of an issue. But it's good that you can determine a 200ms ping, despite having said in the same sentence that there was no way to compare.

Also I do have a job, and I still don't see why I should take the stick and pay 4 bucks for somethign that doesn't offer anything special, also my friends play on PC and only locally do we use a console. They know better, they aren't about to bend over for MS either. Oh, they also probably have higher paying jobs than you.

$4 is hardly "taking the stick." It's a fee of next to nothing for a good service. If you don't like it, don't pay it. I could wash my own car, but I run it through the carwash instead. Am I taking the stick? Or am I choosing to spend a small amount of money for something I think is valuable.

And ouch, your friends probably earn more than me... You got me good. (Also, it is statistically very unlikely that they do - And I can't imagine them even noticing $4 a month even being worth commenting on if they did)

Also alright the PS3 was behind, but it has caught up, why should someone pay for LIVE now?

It has nearly caught up - there's still a few advantages that Live has. And why shoudl they pay now? Maybe because it was ahead for 2 years, so now 10 million more people in the US have 360's than PS3s? Certainly not worth investing in a PS3 just for PSN.

As for MMOs, you obvioulsy haven't played them enough to understand. ALso look at Guild Wars, that one was free and it did what you wanted. As for inter-game communication, launch your games through Steam, it does inter game chat and voice. But I guess ignorant people like you wouldn't know about that so they rather bend over for other companies and pay for subpar experiences.

You are basing that on absolutely nothing. I played MMORPGs from the days of EQ when they were just being born through to breaking free from WoW last year. I've also played numerous ones in between. Oh good, 1 MMO meets the criteria given. And voice communication through steam? I've tried using voice chat in L4D2 on both PC and 360, and let me tell you, 360 blows it away. Infact, even when we play games on Steam, my friends and I still opt to use Vent. 

Infact, I clearly.. so very clearly... stated that it was the implementation of voice chat options that was sub par, not that they didn't exist. It doesn't sound like you've used Live, or else you wouldn't even be discussing this.

Also yes, you can indeed get an older game for 10 bucks. Another way you show your utter ignorance. There are FAR more indie games that come out on the PC than on LIVE, and yes they are all cheap and many are btter than most games that come out at full price, especially the console ones. Also required voice chat for communication is the worst idea ever. I generally turn it off in games like L4D2 because I don't want to listen to idiots when I'm having fun. But I guess 360 owners are fine with all the little retarded children yelling at them, they even count is as a plus and think it's a great thing!

What? I never said you couldn't get good games for $10. But you indicated that amount of content was all that mattered. And by that (faulty) logic, virtually no full price game is worth it.

And great, now you're calling a very useful feature bad, because you've made an excuse to discount its value? When playing an intense game, instant hands-free communication can be the difference between victory and defeat. And you can silence "little retarded children." As with anything useful and valuable, some people abuse and misuse it. But being a PC gamer, surely you realize that this didn't start with voice communication. As someone who started playing on Battle.Net in the early days of StarCraft, I can assure you, annoying people were just as much an issue in the days when communication was all typed.