MarketTantrik Posted June 18, 2008 Report Share Posted June 18, 2008 Why Xbox Live isn't free We take a closer look at Live and ask: what is it we're paying for? From: http://www.gamesradar.com/xbox360/f/why-xb...617101147502012 _______________________________________________________ Until recently, Microsoft could brag about how Live was by far the most feature-complete online service on any platform, with a unified Friends list, the best online shop, voice and video chat as standard and a consistent and stable online experience. But in recent months there’s been a shift in the market, and even bigger changes are coming. Microsoft is the only player to charge for online play, and their policy has landed some of the best online games on the 360... but as PC and PlayStation developers offer comparable features at no extra cost, the Gold subscription starts to lose its shine. The launch of the PC’s Steam Community late last year and promises made by Sony at January’s Consumer Electronics Show have placed Microsoft on the back foot, and has all of us asking: what does your annual subscription pay for? The Punters It’s very simple math - you take the features offered by Xbox Live, subtract the features offered by Live Silver, and then subtract the features Microsoft’s nearest competitor - the Playstation Network - offers for free, and whatever’s left is what Gold users get for their annual fee. In Microsoft’s own words, the perks of being a Gold subscriber are as follows: 1) Play your Xbox 360 multiplayer games online with the premiere online gaming service. 2) Use the brand new TrueSkill Matchmaking system to play against opponents with similar skills, personalities, and gaming tastes. 3) Give player feedback to rate your teammates and opponents on their sportsmanship, abilities, and conduct to influence matchmaking. 4) Play select original Xbox games online (the Xbox 360 Hard Drive is required). 5) Get access to exclusive Gold Member content. 6) Engage in video chat. 7) Enjoy all the Xbox Live Silver features. Freed from PR-speak, points one, two and three are essentially standard functions of modern online play: multiplayer gaming, online ranking and feedback systems, so we’ll consider them one point. Point four is available to Silver members and even to people without a broadband connection by downloading the CD from xbox.com. Five presumably refers to the demos which are available earlier for Gold subscribers, but that’s really more a way of gimping Silver types than rewarding Gold subscribers. Point six, we can’t argue with - video chat is limited to Gold - but as point seven demonstrates, Live Marketplace, Arcade games, DLC and auto-updates are available at no cost to Silver members. We’ll kindly add to Microsoft’s list an eighth and ninth point - mass messaging is only available to Gold users, and Microsoft should be a little more proud of their unified Friends list and messenger which makes online gaming with friends such a complete pleasure. So, with our non-scientific method, we’ve stripped Microsoft’s nine points down to just four: 1) Online play with standard features offered elsewhere. 2) Video chat. 3) Mass messaging. 4) Unified Friends list and messenger. And of those four, Sony’s PSN offers one, two and three for no charge to players. In effect, your subscription pays for... er, nothing more than a list of 100 names you can pull up in any game. Still, what you don’t see is that, unlike PSN, Live’s hosting - leaderboards, Matchmaking, the lot - are all run by Microsoft rather than by third parties. It means devs are more keen to go online on Xbox where the online play is paid for by you, rather than them, so - in that sense, at least - Live’s hosting model makes for a more cohesive and better supported service, but a model where the cost will always be picked up on the gamer’s end. The Competition PC PC gaming has been free or ad-supported for a long time. EA runs Battlefield servers quite happily without a charge, and services like GameSpy handle matchmaking for hundreds of games with ad support and an optional subscription charge. Most recently, the online Steam store launched back in 2003 as a means to deliver Valve’s games to their customers; it has grown and filled its virtual shelves with stock from the likes of Rockstar, Sega and Capcom, and in September last year, spawned the Steam Community. With 15 million users, it dwarfs Xbox Live, and with a unified Friends list, superior online store, and chat and community functions all offered at no cost to gamers, it makes a mockery of Microsoft’s Live service on both PC and 360. Just as Steam is free to gamers, so Steamworks - a set of free tools allowing developers to incorporate anti-piracy, auto-updating and community functions into their games at no cost - is free to developers. The PC already has matchmaking services like GameSpy, but Steamworks is Valve’s move to standardise features across the PC gaming space and has the potential to unify PC gamers through the Steam platform at no charge to developer or gamer. PlayStation 3 While a dedicated CoD4 player will spend hard-earned money every year for his games on Live, a similarly dedicated player on the PlayStation Network will pay nothing for a service of comparable quality. We can argue over which platform has the better games line-up until we’re all very old and dead, but it’s impossible to dispute who gets the cheaper deal when it comes to playing the same games online. And though Live currently trumps the PSN with its unified Friends list which allows players to connect and chat to Friends in different games, the PlayStation 3 will be updated to include its own cross-game unified Friends list before the end of 2008. Sony’s announcement at January’s CES threatens to place the PlayStation Network on a par with Live, all at no cost to the end user. Like Live, players will be able to send messages and chat with Friends in other games, though thanks to PSN’s more open structure, some third party developers may still insist upon using their own system. Konami’s recent Metal Gear Online Beta debacle demonstrates why Live’s unified system is better for gamers, but a few months down the line MGO has proved to be mostly stable and entirely free, while Gears of War 2 still costs 360 owners their pocket money for their nightly games. Wii The Nintendo Wii lags behind, with no unified Friends list, no voice chat in most games and only rare online support, but it does have a very rich online shop, and currently offers its online gaming at no charge. Though Nintendo is set to charge for certain games later this year, damn them. Still, the two big games, Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros Brawl work quite nicely online without taking a penny from your pocket, and their dashboard offers local news, weather at the click of a button and dedicated channels for daily votes and comparing your Mii avatars. Nintendo’s online service offers some neat tricks, but it remains hampered by their ultra family-friendly policy. The Developers So long as the expense of running servers and matchmaking systems has to be picked up by somebody, no online gaming service will ever be truly ‘free’. The cost of PSN and PC online gaming is typically picked up by developers and publishers. CoD4, for example, runs on similar systems on both console platforms, but is maintained by Microsoft on Live and by a dedicated third party company at Activision’s expense on PSN. Both play the same at your end and both work on a peer-to-peer system with a matchmaking layer to link players up, but on Live you pay for that layer, and on PSN they pay. Live is a great deal for third parties then, but less so for gamers. On the plus side, it means Microsoft get the lion’s share of online-enabled games, with even the most low-rent of independent developers able to support online matchmaking in their games. Meaning, overall, it makes online play in multi-format titles far more likely on the 360. But again, is it really $49.99/£39.99’s worth of bonus? The PC/PSN model - where publishers/developers run their own matchmaking systems - has worked for years and PC gamers have enjoyed cost-free gaming even before the days of multiplayer Doom. Sega’s Dreamcast was arguably the first console to make a dent in the online space and managed to offer online play in the majority of its titles at no cost. PlayStation is set to offer users everything Live does at no cost in the near future, Steam offers everything Live does in its supported games, and the Wii... well, at least it’s free, eh? THE TRUTH Live’s best asset is that it allows even small developers to support online play - the value of which can’t possibly be denied. Without it, we’d never see online play in small-budget XBLA titles or even marginalised full-price games. The question to ask is whether or not that’s worth the precious money from your pocket, on rotation, every 12 months. From the player’s end experience, Live is the leader, but it’s hardly a full fifty bucks/forty-quid ahead of its competition. The market has changed since 2002 and so long as the PlayStation Network and Steam Community threaten to match Live feature-for-feature, Live needs to be obviously better in some other way, especially in the UK where it costs a full fifteen quid more for a yearly subscription than the $50 (£25) cost over in the U.S. At some point in the coming months, PSN will rob Live’s Friends List, completing its mimicry of Microsoft’s system. It’s at that point where questions must start to be asked of Live. It’s certainly easier for developers, but as gamers, perhaps we should rightly expect just a little more from our Gold subscription. ____________________________________________________________ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HundredProofSam Posted June 18, 2008 Report Share Posted June 18, 2008 air, water, sex, online multiplayer - just some of the things in life that should be free peace Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godspeed4476 Posted June 18, 2008 Report Share Posted June 18, 2008 air, water, sex, online multiplayer - just some of the things in life that should be freepeace sex is never free man if u calculate the investments its never free......... @topic: 1 more reason for me to shift to ps3.........damn the fable 2 for being exclusive :cry5: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
killzone123 Posted June 22, 2008 Report Share Posted June 22, 2008 few things are free...for the rest there is visa honestly xbox live should cost a wee bit less Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GamerZ-Cloud Strife Posted June 22, 2008 Report Share Posted June 22, 2008 it is not ordinary LIVE is M$ Xbox Live.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tesla Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Some websites have predicted an announcement of price cut in xbox live subscription this e3 , something that would make it more affordable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john117 Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 even then we will get the short end of stick .. it will take long time for subsrciption fee to drop in india .. in case a price drop does happen .. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ctrl_alt_del Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Don't want to sound like a fanboy over here but there is something I have been wondering. Don't PS3 owners pay more for their games which could range from anywhere between Rs.300 to Rs.500? So technically, aren't they, in a way, paying for the free PSN already as I don't see anything else that they are getting with the costlier games besides free PSN. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john117 Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 +1 yeah the cost of hosting online games for PSN is borne by devs and it eventually trickles down to the gamers in form of costlier games . only thing i hv gotta say only steam is truely free online service .. and with time it will get better then xbox live .. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ctrl_alt_del Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Would like to hear from the PS3 owners. Do they think the free PSN service comes as a hidden charge alongwith all PS3 games, irrespective of whether you game online or not? Your views please. Again, it's no Xbox 360 owns PS3 thread. Just a logical question expecting logical answers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtheK Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 its more because of the media CAD...check the prices of BR and DL DVD you will get your answer. With the cost eventually to go down of media we shall see if the game prices fall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarbonCore Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Would like to hear from the PS3 owners. Do they think the free PSN service comes as a hidden charge alongwith all PS3 games, irrespective of whether you game online or not? Your views please. Again, it's no Xbox 360 owns PS3 thread. Just a logical question expecting logical answers. PS3 games cost more in India, the MRP for both PS3 and 360 games are exactly the same elsewhere. So blame our distributers, nothing to do with PSN or developers. Also all the games with dedicated server are first party, so the cost for servers is paid by Sony, it doesn't trickle down to games lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ctrl_alt_del Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 I presume that media is costly because only Sony has the licence to produce them. With Blu-Ray winning the war, isn't it time that the prices move southwards? Is there any indication that such a thing would be happeningw within the next one year? Besides, doesn't PS3 have the capability to play DVD9? So why cant the games be shipped on DVD9 until Blu-Ray gets cheaper? Obviously I am not taking MGS4 into the equation here as it's a one-off case. Rest of the multiplatform games can be and have been fitted on a DVD9 disc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HundredProofSam Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 games cost the same on PS3 and 360 in other markets....Blu Ray or PSN has nothing to do with it....even if u look at PS3 game prices in India, its the same as US MRP....its not that PS3 games cost more in India, but rather 360 games cost less....mohit anand told me a long time ago that they would rather make games cheaper than the console...that is microsoft policy in India COD4 and GTA4 cost 2,500 on the 360.....so these are pricing policies for India...not all 360 game cost 1999 or 1895 in India....MS has managed to convince some publishers to sell at 1999 and some they havent peace Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ctrl_alt_del Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Quick check on Play Asia revealed this COD 4 Standard PS3 : $68.90 COD 4 Standard X360 : $64.90 Difference is $4 which is approx INR 160. GTA 4 Standard PS3 : $64.90 GTA 4 Standard X360 : $49.90 Difference is $15 which is approx INR 600. I am still seeing a disparity in the prices here. Can anyone check Amazon for prices in UK and USA? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarbonCore Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 Don't use PA for price check, they have different region games with different price points. Jap games on PA are more expensive than US, which cost more than Asian. Both versions cost 59.99$ on Amazon and 39.99 GBP on Game.co.uk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ctrl_alt_del Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 That seems to be a valid explaintaion CC and Sam. Point noted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MarketTantrik Posted July 2, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 PS3 games cost more in India, the MRP for both PS3 and 360 games are exactly the same elsewhere. So blame our distributers, nothing to do with PSN or developers. Also all the games with dedicated server are first party, so the cost for servers is paid by Sony, it doesn't trickle down to games lol. Next Article on LameGuru: "Indian gamers subsidizing PSN worldwide" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john117 Posted July 2, 2008 Report Share Posted July 2, 2008 :roflroll2: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don Karnage Posted July 3, 2008 Report Share Posted July 3, 2008 I was asking myself the same question when I couldn't play Gears of War PC (ranked) while TF2 works without any gold subscription. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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