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[Stoffinator]

subscription fees and microtransactions for things which have been free for decades on other platforms.

Congrats for screwing us over, MS

I concur.

 

[antiquegamer]

Yeah, I don't get the rage. They offered something to their consumer base that the base was willing to pay for. Nintendo and Sony do this all the time too.

Haven't you notice that it's OK for some when Nintendo and Sony does something but for Microsoft it's always work of a devil.

Sony HOME making profit thread was litter with Sony forces proclaming how great it is (and how great Home is).

If you find Live to be not worth your money be it $30 or $50 then by all means use the other platform. People try to tell you why (such as Beer Monkey) that Live offer him the value for his money he was ram with crap like oh you can do it on PC with Teamspeak. You can do all kind of stuff on PC, you can watch movies browse internet buy why people want to go out and get iPad that does the same thing for more, well because it's offer them the experience that they want.

My brother (and his family) use Live because it's convenience and it does what we are lookign for. We both have limited time and Live is great for coming home, turn on the Xbox to see if he or my niece is on. We get into a Party we talk, then may be play quick game of Magic or whatever. I can get my kids on Live and we all play games or chat together.

Some of you guys need to go back and remember what online was like on console, heck just go on the Wii. That where the console on-line gaming would still be if not for MS. Are there thing they do that annoy me, you bet but overall they did move the console online gaming forward.

And guess what if Live is not for you it's not like you don't have Steam, PSN etc to go to. What you don't need to do is come here and call people that find Live useful stupid.

 

[SamBishop]

Well, from what I recall on some of Nintendo's quotes in the past about online, they want to keep their online free but they have mentioned charging for extra features that doesn't hinder multiplayer modes while updating and revamping their system to be more robust. As for Sony, they already started charging and mimicking Microsoft so there goes that hope.

The one differentiator there is that at least the other two haven't yet decided for charge for stuff that's not more or less optional. The core functionality that everyone's gotten used to isn't going to suddenly get walled off. So long as that gets taken into the next gen as well -- and were Microsoft to actually follow suit (soooo not happening), I wouldn't complain at all.

Then again, I'm one of those guys that doesn't really like to do same-game voice chat, so as long as I can play with other people for free, I couldn't care less about cross-game voice chat or any other features that bring things to parity with live's feature set at this point. I'm all for optional buy-in services that add more stuff so long as nothing I've come to see as standard is affected. I'm pretty happy with what I can do on both machines for free, but that's mainly because I play games, occasionally chat, enjoy competitive/co-op online and exchange the odd text message.

I'm literally the guy that's probably in some random focus group that makes Sony and Nintendo go, "welp, we're done here," hahahaha.

 

[Keavy_Rain]

Why do other people care what we spend our money on? This whole conversation reminds me of the Penny Arcade comic strip that they released when Braid came out. "You idiots pay $15 for stupid shit like T-Shirts with video game crap on them, but you won't pay $15 for Braid, so fuck you assholes." That comic, combined with the attitude of those who supported it, turned me off of Braid even though I never played it, which is sad because I downloaded the demo last night, out of boredom, and absolutely loved it.

I pay for Xbox Live, I have my reasons, but I'm not going to berate someone else for not paying for Xbox Live. Same thing with Home and PSN Plus. If you like those things, great. I don't see the need to pay for those things, so I don't.

 

[FrankT]

Haven't you notice that it's OK for some when Nintendo and Sony does something but for Microsoft it's always work of a devil.

Sony HOME making profit thread was litter with Sony forces proclaming how great it is (and how great Home is).

If you find Live to be not worth your money be it $30 or $50 then by all means use the other platform. People try to tell you why (such as Beer Monkey) that Live offer him the value for his money he was ram with crap like oh you can do it on PC with Teamspeak. You can do all kind of stuff on PC, you can watch movies browse internet buy why people want to go out and get iPad that does the same thing for more, well because it's offer them the experience that they want.

My brother (and his family) use Live because it's convenience and it does what we are lookign for. We both have limited time and Live is great for coming home, turn on the Xbox to see if he or my niece is on. We get into a Party we talk, then may be play quick game of Magic or whatever. I can get my kids on Live and we all play games or chat together.

Some of you guys need to go back and remember what online was like on console, heck just go on the Wii. That where the console on-line gaming would still be if not for MS. Are there thing they do that annoy me, you bet but overall they did move the console online gaming forward.

And guess what if Live is not for you it's not like you don't have Steam, PSN etc to go to. What you don't need to do is come here and call people that find Live useful stupid.

Well it's the same arguments year after year. Yet nothing has changed. Live continues to grow. The alternatives are there so use them. I mean if people are into PSN plus (or any other online service for that matter) more power to them yet that isn’t going to change a thing about what Live offers to that huge online userbase that is willing to pay for it year after year.

Why do other people care what we spend our money on? This whole conversation reminds me of the Penny Arcade comic strip that they released when Braid came out. "You idiots pay $15 for stupid shit like T-Shirts with video game crap on them, but you won't pay $15 for Braid, so fuck you assholes." That comic, combined with the attitude of those who supported it, turned me off of Braid even though I never played it, which is sad because I downloaded the demo last night, out of boredom, and absolutely loved it.

I pay for Xbox Live, I have my reasons, but I'm not going to berate someone else for not paying for Xbox Live. Same thing with Home and PSN Plus. If you like those things, great. I don't see the need to pay for those things, so I don't.

That is just so silly. I was certainly one to find high value in Braid. Of course I didn't express my opinion of that way, but to overlook a gem because of others opinion on the price of all things is just silly at best.

 

[LosDaddie]

Well deserved success for MS and XBL. I definitely get my $30/yr worth.

As usual for XBL threads; Haters Gonna Hate

 

[M3d10n]

I thought I worded it to indicate an anecdotal example. Sorry if I didn't.

I have many friends with PS3s and 360s (like myself). We all pay for XBL and play regularly, but none of us really, if ever play online on PS3, despite it being free. I have played some Resistance, Uncharted 2, a dab of Killzone 2, but nothing much really.

I'm sure we're not the only people in this scenario.

Of course: you're paying for it, so it's in your best interest to use as much of the service as you can, consciously or not.

The fee actually increases user fidelity.

 

[flyinpiranha]

Of course: you're paying for it, so it's in your best interest to use as much of the service as you can, consciously or not.

The fee actually increases user fidelity.

Meh, this isn't really true. I pay for it and have had it since I got my 360 and haven't played online in a while mainly due to my other friends not playing the same games right now.

It's a one time fee ... I don't think about it like something I "gotta use 'cuz I paid for it".

Not sure about others but your statement is pretty far off for me.

 

[Vinci]

What you are ignoring here is that the issue is already well-settled in the marketplace about what is "worth" a monthly fee.

Which marketplace, the PC market or the console market? Because they aren't the same in this respect. PC gamers often look at people paying for Live and laugh, but console gamers don't seem to find it all that big a deal. Same goes for a great deal of DLC and the like. Do I feel a subscription based FPS could work in the market on the PC? It would have to do something absolutely mind-blowing in order for that to happen, or at the very least by persistent like MMOs. But in the console space? I don't know. I think it's possible that it would do rather well whether it were a MMO style game or not, depending on the game and its fanbase. COD's fanbase has appeared very willing to pay for more and more content and to play the game for an extended period of time.

I'll say this much: If COD Online does come out and it succeeds, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised; if it came out and died, then the marketplace (the console market) has truly said that it will not accept monthly fees in a FPS. If COD can't do it, nothing can.

 

[ClosingADoor]

Of course: you're paying for it, so it's in your best interest to use as much of the service as you can, consciously or not.

The fee actually increases user fidelity.

$5 a month? Yes, that really motivates me to play a lot more... It's a low price for a good service and I gladly pay for it.

 

[Beer Monkey]

Started a thread to ask GAF MW2 players how they feel about a subscription service:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=22283668

 

[FrankT]

Meh, this isn't really true. I pay for it and have had it since I got my 360 and haven't played online in a while mainly due to my other friends not playing the same games right now.

It's a one time fee ... I don't think about it like something I "gotta use 'cuz I paid for it".

Not sure about others but your statement is pretty far off for me.

I would think that would ring true for many.

 

[charlequin]

Which marketplace, the PC market or the console market? Because they aren't the same in this respect.

What Microsoft has done is monetize all the "value-added" community features of their platform (the cross-game invites and the friend game lists and whatnot) by charging for "playing online," which certainly draws a lot of (rightful) sneers given that the actual "playing online" you get for your money isn't particularly good -- but the real purpose of the charge is to support all the other stuff and the "playing online" is a nice, easily-identifiable feature that they can use to actually drive the subscriptions.

When you get down to it, people don't pay for the type of feature package represented by XBL on PC because they don't need to: the most successful implementation of that idea on PC is Steam, whose platform development Valve has chosen to subsidize out of the sales of digital content it helps generate rather than monetize directly. Does that mean PC gamers don't value these features? More importantly, does it mean that some significant number of them would never buy into a monetized system to get them (either directly or via licensing fees to participating developers, ad revenue, what-have-you)? I don't think so; they just have the option to get them without directly paying extra for them. (Certainly gamers who do things like renting Mumble servers are paying money for a feature that, indeed, XBL customers are also paying for, as one example; for a less flattering example, look at how well MW2 and its DLC have done on PC despite offering a 100% consolized experience and overcharging for content.)

Generally speaking, all the "differences" between the PC market and those on consoles are just a question of competition -- there are areas in which competition has left more potential dollars unharnessed in the PC realm while a closed console marketplace can afford to price-discriminate a bit more (see: constant Steam sales vs. fairly static XBL prices.)

But multiplayer dudebro shooters is not an area in which there is any lack of competition on consoles. The value of MW as a franchise is not that it's so much dramatically better than every potential competitor that people want to pay literally $100 more for it; it's that all other things being equal, the content you get for buying into that series is better than the alternatives. That's good only as long as all other things are equal.

If you slap an $8 monthly fee on something like MW2, either the result is that the game was really about $100 underpriced the whole time (in which case literally everyone with a multiplayer-oriented game has been leaving money on the table and you'll instantaneously see 100% uptake on adding fees of this type to every game) or, much more likely, someone else will produce a just-about-as-good game with no monthly fee, and profit handsomely because what kind of idiot is going to pay $8 to play MW3 when BFBC3 is free?

(And getting back to my earlier point: neither of these scenarios is actually good at all for Microsoft or Sony, which is why neither of them is going to allow this kind of experiment on their platform. Everyone charging for multiplayer strangles the growth of their platform; one major title trying and failing looks bad in a way that pretty much by definition the limited cut of those monthly fees won't make up for.)

 

[FrankT]

What Microsoft has done is monetize all the "value-added" community features of their platform (the cross-game invites and the friend game lists and whatnot) by charging for "playing online," which certainly draws a lot of (rightful) sneers given that the actual "playing online" you get for your money isn't particularly good -- but the real purpose of the charge is to support all the other stuff and the "playing online" is a nice, easily-identifiable feature that they can use to actually drive the subscriptions.

When you get down to it, people don't pay for the type of feature package represented by XBL on PC because they don't need to: the most successful implementation of that idea on PC is Steam, whose platform development Valve has chosen to subsidize out of the sales of digital content it helps generate rather than monetize directly. Does that mean PC gamers don't value these features? More importantly, does it mean that some significant number of them would never buy into a monetized system to get them (either directly or via licensing fees to participating developers, ad revenue, what-have-you)? I don't think so; they just have the option to get them without directly paying extra for them. (Certainly gamers who do things like renting Mumble servers are paying money for a feature that, indeed, XBL customers are also paying for, as one example; for a less flattering example, look at how well MW2 and its DLC have done on PC despite offering a 100% consolized experience and overcharging for content.)

Generally speaking, all the "differences" between the PC market and those on consoles are just a question of competition -- there are areas in which competition has left more potential dollars unharnessed in the PC realm while a closed console marketplace can afford to price-discriminate a bit more (see: constant Steam sales vs. fairly static XBL prices.)

But multiplayer dudebro shooters is not an area in which there is any lack of competition on consoles. The value of MW as a franchise is not that it's so much dramatically better than every potential competitor that people want to pay literally $100 more for it; it's that all other things being equal, the content you get for buying into that series is better than the alternatives. That's good only as long as all other things are equal.

If you slap an $8 monthly fee on something like MW2, either the result is that the game was really about $100 underpriced the whole time (in which case literally everyone with a multiplayer-oriented game has been leaving money on the table and you'll instantaneously see 100% uptake on adding fees of this type to every game) or, much more likely, someone else will produce a just-about-as-good game with no monthly fee, and profit handsomely because what kind of idiot is going to pay $8 to play MW3 when BFBC3 is free?

(And getting back to my earlier point: neither of these scenarios is actually good at all for Microsoft or Sony, which is why neither of them is going to allow this kind of experiment on their platform. Everyone charging for multiplayer strangles the growth of their platform; one major title trying and failing looks bad in a way that pretty much by definition the limited cut of those monthly fees won't make up for.)

I pretty much agree with the last point it simply isn't in their interest to do so. Although I could still see the possibility of it happening one day.

 

[Slayer-33]

What Microsoft has done is monetize all the "value-added" community features of their platform (the cross-game invites and the friend game lists and whatnot) by charging for "playing online," which certainly draws a lot of (rightful) sneers given that the actual "playing online" you get for your money isn't particularly good -- but the real purpose of the charge is to support all the other stuff and the "playing online" is a nice, easily-identifiable feature that they can use to actually drive the subscriptions.

When you get down to it, people don't pay for the type of feature package represented by XBL on PC because they don't need to: the most successful implementation of that idea on PC is Steam, whose platform development Valve has chosen to subsidize out of the sales of digital content it helps generate rather than monetize directly. Does that mean PC gamers don't value these features? More importantly, does it mean that some significant number of them would never buy into a monetized system to get them (either directly or via licensing fees to participating developers, ad revenue, what-have-you)? I don't think so; they just have the option to get them without directly paying extra for them. (Certainly gamers who do things like renting Mumble servers are paying money for a feature that, indeed, XBL customers are also paying for, as one example; for a less flattering example, look at how well MW2 and its DLC have done on PC despite offering a 100% consolized experience and overcharging for content.)

Generally speaking, all the "differences" between the PC market and those on consoles are just a question of competition -- there are areas in which competition has left more potential dollars unharnessed in the PC realm while a closed console marketplace can afford to price-discriminate a bit more (see: constant Steam sales vs. fairly static XBL prices.)

But multiplayer dudebro shooters is not an area in which there is any lack of competition on consoles. The value of MW as a franchise is not that it's so much dramatically better than every potential competitor that people want to pay literally $100 more for it; it's that all other things being equal, the content you get for buying into that series is better than the alternatives. That's good only as long as all other things are equal.

If you slap an $8 monthly fee on something like MW2, either the result is that the game was really about $100 underpriced the whole time (in which case literally everyone with a multiplayer-oriented game has been leaving money on the table and you'll instantaneously see 100% uptake on adding fees of this type to every game) or, much more likely, someone else will produce a just-about-as-good game with no monthly fee, and profit handsomely because what kind of idiot is going to pay $8 to play MW3 when BFBC3 is free?

(And getting back to my earlier point: neither of these scenarios is actually good at all for Microsoft or Sony, which is why neither of them is going to allow this kind of experiment on their platform. Everyone charging for multiplayer strangles the growth of their platform; one major title trying and failing looks bad in a way that pretty much by definition the limited cut of those monthly fees won't make up for.)

Only part I don't agree with.

Xbox live is a well structured network for console gamers.


For what it is Xbox live MP has been nothing but great in terms of gameplay with rare cases of detestable lag on anyone's end be it p2p online or not and minus the annoying little brats that get the quick mute toggle from my experiences.

Should the mp have been free? Maybe but it isn't because MS has full control over it, unlike on the PC where only MMORPGS can get away with subs fee's because of the way PC gaming is. MS has made it a successful business and the first of it's kind in terms of success on a console platform that emerged from the visions of seganet.

*shudder*

Whenever people say "cross game voice chat" like it is some completely out there amazing feature worth paying a monthly fee for I think back on nearly a decade of using Teamspeak. That sounds awfully master race-y so I'll just go and scream at the kids on my lawn now.

You didn't notice what I was getting at when I mentioned cross game VC? :lol I don't pay for live just for that :lol


Anyway.. I've used/use Skype(still do)/Ventrillo(still do)/TS(lol old)/Roger Wilco(back in the Ghost Recon PC days loool), this isn't a foreign concept for me, I game on PC and 360. But I don't have an issue with paying $30-35 a year for a great console service like Xbox Live :lol some of you guys assume some of us are clueless when it comes to PC gaming.

 

[Slayer-33]

-- gah nm this post

 

[FrankT]

Only part I don't agree with.

Xbox live is a well structured network for console gamers.


For what it is Xbox live MP has been nothing but great in terms of gameplay with rare cases of detestable lag on anyone's end be it p2p online or not and minus the annoying little brats that get the quick mute toggle from my experiences.

Should the mp have been free? Maybe but it isn't because MS has full control over it, unlike on the PC where only MMORPGS can get away with subs fee's because of the way PC gaming is. MS has made it a successful business and the first of it's kind in terms of success on a console platform that emerged from the visions of seganet.





You didn't notice what I was getting at when I mentioned cross game VC? :lol I don't pay for live just for that :lol


Anyway.. I've used/use Skype(still do)/Ventrillo(still do)/TS(lol old)/Roger Wilco(back in the Ghost Recon PC days loool), this isn't a foreign concept for me, I game on PC and 360. But I don't have an issue with paying $30-35 a year for a great console service like Xbox Live :lol some of you guys assume some of us are clueless when it comes to PC gaming.

Agreed, although there was no incentive to making it free then either and especially not now in retrospect.