Gaming

"Imagine paying for the internet twice." -PC Gamers

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.

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.

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 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

Stop preordering, support Indi games.

This isn't hard guys.

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.

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?

Steam has your back

This has always been my sole reason for never buying a console.

People pay it. There's yer problem.

Switched to PC gaming years ago and never looked back. Praise gaben.

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.

Get a Steam Deck or build some SteamOS machine console.

That's why I only buy consoles that aren't supported anymore and mod them, it's just better and cheaper.

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.

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.