So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.
We do have that. It’s the gas tax we pay to the government.
I dont think the analogy works. Gas taxes are universal in the U.S. for road fuel, they also fund infrastructure, not stock holders and CEOs.
A tax is not an arbitrary subscription fee, it’s an ongoing expensive.
In order for your analogy to work, the fee would need to be created out of no where for no reason other than self enrichment; and there would need to be a viable alternative that provides practically the exact same benefit with no fee. The fee would also need to expire and require renwal despite not using the product, which isn’t the case for gas.
It works pretty well. The console network fees fund infrastructure, the employees that run the infrastructure, etc. neither the gas tax nor the console network fees are arbitrary. As for the “required renewal despite not using it” thing we just have other things for that in the form of vehicle registration.
I mean where they spend the money is irrelevant. If I rob you, is it suddenly okay if I spend your money responsibly? No.
PC has had online multiplayer since the creation of the internet, and PC did it without ever having a fee on top of internet access.
I would also argue that playstation plus membership fees, with all their millions of dollars, have not created a better environment than what available on PC for free, so…
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.
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. Today Steam has similar functionality, but Valve is just eating those costs, just as Sony used to. Difference is Valve doesn’t have to sell you your computer at a loss, they they can have loss leaders like that in different areas.
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.
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. Multiplayer existed on consoles prior to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, but just like their PC counterpart, it was clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent between games. The PlayStation network and XBL were created as a direct result of those issues.
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. Maybe it’s helpful to point out that Valve doesn’t have public investors, and the vast majority of game development companies also don’t have investors. The simplest solution here is that the subscription fee was created out greed, not necessity.
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.