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 failing to grasp 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, so 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.
it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player
Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.
You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.
Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.
And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.
These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
Fret not, anything they aren’t going to actively milk will likely be sold off to try and pay back the $20 billion dollar loan they took to make this purchase.
Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.
I’m seeing a lot of games with what seems like a much steeper discount than usual. First thing I do when there’s a steam sale is look at my wishlist and sort by discount and there are a lot of games on sale for 90% off, many of which only a couple dollars.
There’s a difference between a game being way outside of your specs because it’s graphically very advanced and your hardware is old, and a game just being unoptimized slop that expects its users to deal with by throwing higher specs at a fixable problem.
I have a brand new 5070ti that can play all kinds of UE5 games with much better graphics than BL4 at 4k resolution with ray tracing at a decent frame rate without relying on frame gen. And I’m in the top few percentiles here.