Comment on Xbox’s leadership shift proves it: the gamer era is over, AI runs the show now
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 week agoI mean where they spend the money is irrelevant.
So it’s ok to pay money for infrastructure for your car to use, but when you have to pay for the infrastructure for your video games it’s robbery? Now I feel like you’re the one being arbitrary.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet
This tells me you weren’t around for the early days of PC gaming. On the contrary, PC gaming went through a couple phases when it came to online multiplayer. Early multiplayer games often didn’t have matchmaking or dedicated server discovery at all, then there was the Gamespy era where a bunch of games delegated their multiplayer matchmaking to a third party with limited functionality and ads unless you paid a premium subscription.
It was the game consoles that really fixed multiplayer early on with their party systems that persisted outside of each game.
Abundance114@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for internet infrastructure. PC has no monthly fee, and it’s infrastructure is exactly the same.
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
In 2002 Warcraft 3’s multiplayer was fine. In 2002 Battlefield 1942 was fine; It was a good as Halo’s multiplayer, which somehow ALSO had fine multiplayer at release in 2001 despite the subscription service for multiplayer not until a year after the game had already launched.
Even if I gave you that, the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It is. The party system, voice chat services, and the ability to join on or invite friends in a universal way regardless of the game without having to make an account for that game all requires expensive infrastructure and manpower to build and maintain.
Xbox GamePass released in 2017 and has nothing to do with multiplayer. The multiplayer service Xbox live released in 2002 and PlayStation followed in 2006. You’re not beating the allegations.
Game developers were uninvolved in the fix for multiplayer design. Game developers are unsurprisingly, only involved in the development of their game. The reliable third party social systems were designed by engineers at Xbox and Sony, and on the PC side at Valve.
Abundance114@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah sorry, what is this… Like the third time I’ve stated this? PC did all of the things you’re claiming without an extra subscription fee. Sure, maybe Xbox took some subscription fees and funded infrastructure, that’s not my point. My point is they didn’t need to, as evidenced by someone else who did the exact same thing without the subscription model.
Playstation and Xbox, as a publicly traded hardware and software company, are much more pressured to discover and capture extraneous revenue sources; and the vast majority of the subscription income went to investors.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It did not do all those things. Not until very recently, and only through Steam. You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn’t make it true lol.
Sony did it for awhile without the subscription model too. Thats not evidence that they didn’t need to. The cost of infrastructure needed to maintain this model has gone up in the last 25 years with more players, higher expectations, and added complexity contributing to more manpower and higher salary expectations.
A free service doesn’t scale very well when it gets exponentially more expensive to maintain as time goes on. Sony was able to subsidize that service at one point in time but very understandably they can’t do that in the big 26. They already sell the hardware at a loss, if they continued to provide that infrastructure for free, leaving them only with commission on PS store sales, but also we don’t want them to take that big a cut from game developers, and we want them to still provide disk drives so we can buy and share games outside their store, and also we don’t want them to buy studios and make games exclusive to their platform… like corporate greed is one thing but also god forbid we just pay a reasonable price for the things we use.
Valve on the other hand doesn’t have to worry about this because they were never in the hardware game to begin with, and now with the Steam Machine they’ve already confirmed they’re not subsidizing hardware.