"Imagine paying for the internet twice." -PC Gamers
Yeah, with the Steam Deck being as good and cheap as it is, consoles hardly even have the "cheaper" justification anymore. Now it's just the artificial exclusives.
Just stop paying for it. After just a few weeks you'll realize it was a silly addiction. There's lots of great games that don't require a subscription.
I did exactly this and now I'm addicted to two new games that have no fees!
Now I'm addicted to drugs and alcohol!
There's a lot of gamers in this thread too young to remember how overloaded and miserable the free console game servers were.
Microsoft was like "chuck us like ~$5 per month and we will put up enough servers so the games are actually playable". At the time, it was the best deal available for console gaming.
Honestly an argument could be made it was the most economical way to play online, in general, at the time. The console cost was subsidized, and the online servers were arguably at-cost, and you really only needed to buy one copy of Halo to join the fun.
Yeah but they don't run the servers anymore. So I don't know what I'm paying for really.
Some (Nintendo) even like using P2P instead of dedicated servers. Which makes it even crazier to pay for online.
When I pay for a game access to the whole game should be included and it is on PC (don't bring up DLCs and all that).
Idk. I was always a PC gamer, and think the old, often modded, independently run servers were much more fun than the soul-less matchmaking I see on most modern games. It was fun to play UT2004, and join a server where the arena was someone's bedroom and all the sound effects were ripped from The Simpsons; or to jump into a clan's open server and shit-talk them while they dominate me, or to join a server run by Beyond Unreal's community, where the mods used were voted on by the community beforehand, IIRC. Good times.
I'ma be the devil's advocate - even if they were free, eventually someone would have made it a subscription-based model since PSN servers cost money. Sure, it's not a lot of money, but it's money.
I'm not so sure. Steam servers also cost money. They make way more money from their cut of sales. On console the same thing happens. If not requiring the subscription gets more users, then you make more money by not having it.
They aren't charging because it costs money to run. They're charging because it's more profitable.
I think it's simply a side-effect of the current state of gaming, which sucks more than people generally consider. We've been getting nudged here slowly over a generation, so it doesnt feel hot to most of us. I'm bitter though and i hold grudges. im old too, so listen to me while i shake my cane!
Everything the game companies currently do with their IPs (locking games to their own servers and charging us for the privilege for example) is all about maintaining complete control of their IP. Remember that fucking lawyer-ese we all have to check-off so we can play the game we paid for? the part where they call what we're getting a 'licence'? Yeah, this is what it looks like when we don't own the things we buy.
If the subscription costs were truly about the cost of running the servers then another option for companies would be to allow for us to make and host our own servers. The fact that a precious few game companies even allow us to host servers long after a game's natural lifetime is over means that they prefer this outcome. When they have control over the servers they get to control the game's lifetime.
Could them cats running Modern Warfare 29 or whatever we're on now keep releasing the same fucking game every year if players were allowed to host their own private servers for the games they bought? No way, right? That's the reason they do private servers, it is more profitable for them to do so.
Now if you made it this far, you're thinking
Hey old-head!! That doesn't really answer the question of why we pay for the privilege of paying twice, the thread you're responding to! did all that leaded gasoline go to your boomerbrain?
first of all kiddo the newspaper that i still read says i'm a xennial or some bullshit so get off the lawn i'll never own and second is i actually don't know. I suspect we pay for it because we can get fucked. The fact we pay is ancillary to the whole control thing. they just do it because now that we're locked in, they can and thats all there is to it
I love paying for nintendo online so I can play splatoon 3 which runs on fucking p2p
Marketplaces are always a game of chicken. If a company thinks they can charge more for less they will; they just need another company to do it first
So glad I bought a Steam Deck. Playing games on the couch with friends who each brought their own controller, easily connecting and combining PS4, PS5, Xbox and Nintendo controllers to play together feels surreal and like living in the future of gaming. Never buying another console or their subscriptions ever again.
Yeah? Who pays for the servers that run your matches?
It may be unpopular to hear, but game prices don't completely cover the cost of development and definitely don't cover server operation costs every month.
And if devs raised prices, you'd be complaining about that too.
PC games do just fine without a subscription model (for the most part).
You don't need dedicated servers for online multiplayer. Locally hosting games used to be the norm.
I’d always been a PC gamer and didn’t really get into console multiplayer games ever. It wasn’t until my young son started growing up and getting into gaming that we started looking at doing multiplayer games on consoles. I was appalled by this whole dumb subscription model for playing multiplayer on games that you already bought over the internet (which you’ve also already paid money to your ISP for). Having played years of online gaming for free, the idea of having to pay to play is just mind-boggling to me (though I’ll allow for MMORPGs and some other types of games, that’s understandable).
The worst offender is/was Gears of War, which requires you to sign up for the Xbox game pass in order to play Horde mode, which is just a goddamn couch co-op mode where you play against waves of cpu opponents. It was fucking free in GoW2, literally no internet required, but then suddenly these bastards required you to subscribe to their dumb fucking gaming service just for the privilege of playing against the computer. When I complained about it, people acted like I was entitled or stuck up for expecting it to be free. Just absolute bullshit.
Yes, World of Warcraft certainly had nothing to do with it.
The gaming phenomena that made billions from their subscription model had absolutely no influence, whatsoever.
How could Microsoft do this?
People pay it. There's yer problem.
This has always been my sole reason for never buying a console.
I mean subscription gaming properly started on the PC with MMOs
-and I say this as a mainly PC gamer. I remember thinking how insane it was that my friend paid monthly to play the new Warcraft game..
Switched to PC gaming years ago and never looked back. Praise gaben.
It's not like Microsoft invented the idea of a paid online gaming service with Live. Total Entertainment Network for PCs and Sega MegaNet for consoles came out well ahead of it.
Get a Steam Deck or build some SteamOS machine console.
Nintendo and Sony's free options were junk. Microsoft mage a product so much better than the free alternatives that people were willing to pay for it.
If it wasn't Microsoft it would have been someone else. The recurring revenue is how businesses have decided is the most effective way to make a profit. The only way that it will cease is for everyone to stop participating in it.
It's why I went back to PC gaming. As an aging man with children, I am no longer interested in having a bleeding edge gaming machine so I went to consoles for a while. It was too painful keeping a subscription on something I don't often play so I didn't bother with a PS5 and got a steamdeck instead.
That's why I only buy consoles that aren't supported anymore and mod them, it's just better and cheaper.
It would have never lasted or been as good. P2P has plenty of issues. And servers would eventually need to be paid for. This would just lead to higher priced games, game specific subscriptions, ad funded online gaming or worse micro transaction per game.
Not an XBox or XBoL user.
If they're running infrastructure that hosts game servers, while keeping all that standardized and cheat-free, that might be a bargain at $15/mo or whatever it costs. But if they're just providing match-making, listing game servers, all while hosting matches on consoles, they're just taking your money.
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