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Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody"

EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online

What you’re both missing here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.

As console adoption increased, as did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.

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Lfrith@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Company gets cut of every single game sold, gets more customers over the years, and because they are making even more money than ever they can’t stay afloat without charging for online.

Yeah… Okay… I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.

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- EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.
  
  I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
  
  I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:
  
  They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
  
  Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
  
  Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
  
  Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.
  
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