“Imagine paying for the internet twice.” -PC Gamers
Yeah, with the Steam Deck being as good and cheap as it is, consoles hardly even have the “cheaper” justification anymore. Now it’s just the artificial exclusives.
Both Microsoft and Sony have started releasing their stuff on PC (DRM-free in Sony’s case.) Even the exclusives are becoming less of an issue now.
It existed and was popular and then poof…it’s gone. That model is kind of dead unless you count battle passes, which are optional…unlike a wow subscription.
Technically speaking, it’s more of online gaming growing around it than it disappearing per-say. Although total subscriber count is always a speculation nowadays, there is prently of evidence of it still retaining 50-70% of peak subscriber count from 2010.
But online gaming became so accessible and widespread that WoW turned from a worldwide phenomenon to a somewhat niche game compared to mainstream MOBA and FPS games.
Just stop paying for it. After just a few weeks you’ll realize it was a silly addiction. There’s lots of great games that don’t require a subscription.
I did exactly this and now I’m addicted to two new games that have no fees!
There’s a lot of gamers in this thread too young to remember how overloaded and miserable the free console game servers were.
Microsoft was like “chuck us like ~$5 per month and we will put up enough servers so the games are actually playable”. At the time, it was the best deal available for console gaming.
Honestly an argument could be made it was the most economical way to play online, in general, at the time. The console cost was subsidized, and the online servers were arguably at-cost, and you really only needed to buy one copy of Halo to join the fun.
Yeah but they don’t run the servers anymore. So I don’t know what I’m paying for really.
Some (Nintendo) even like using P2P instead of dedicated servers. Which makes it even crazier to pay for online.
When I pay for a game access to the whole game should be included and it is on PC (don’t bring up DLCs and all that).
Idk. I was always a PC gamer, and think the old, often modded, independently run servers were much more fun than the soul-less matchmaking I see on most modern games. It was fun to play UT2004, and join a server where the arena was someone’s bedroom and all the sound effects were ripped from The Simpsons; or to jump into a clan’s open server and shit-talk them while they dominate me, or to join a server run by Beyond Unreal’s community, where the mods used were voted on by the community beforehand, IIRC. Good times.
There’s still yet another side to it. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is still around today. Boot it up, and try joining a game. Five hours later, the mods finish loading, and you get a splash screen full of ads before you begin playing with bots.
At the time, it felt like there were a lot of hobbyists willing to shell out cash to run their servers, but ensuring you got a fair game low on mods was often more trouble than it was worth. I’m even a little bit grateful that Team Fortress 2 started hosting their own, even if they failed to fix the bot situations.
Very true. These things do still exist for a lot of games. It lost popularity a lot on CS due to the incessant need for “competitive” matchmaking, but they are still out there. Rust is a good game for heavily modded servers (if you like the game concept in the first place) and I think Arma (which a bit more niche) is basically all community servers, ranging from in depth military reality to role playing much more mundane stuff.
And this is why it was successful and still exists to this day.
excuse the fist shaking at the cloud
Kids these days literally want everything for free and don’t care that microtransactions and other monetization has pervaded every aspect of games.
Horse armour, man. Never forget the horse armour. Kids these days love horse armour.
It’s not a matter of age. You can play for free on PC now and it’s a better experience in many regards. There are also older games (even on console) where you could connect directly to a user through IP address or phone number and those will work to this day. Consoles are the domain of companies that want to have their little walled garden so they can overcharge for things like this.
I’ma be the devil’s advocate - even if they were free, eventually someone would have made it a subscription-based model since PSN servers cost money. Sure, it’s not a lot of money, but it’s money.
I’m not so sure. Steam servers also cost money. They make way more money from their cut of sales. On console the same thing happens. If not requiring the subscription gets more users, then you make more money by not having it.
They aren’t charging because it costs money to run. They’re charging because it’s more profitable.
I agree, and I think we’re actually just saying the same thing - the managers and stuff at (insert big name console manufacturer here) saw the loss by server money (which is, yes, very little money in the grand scheme) and then decided “let’s purge that cost too and get 500000% profit on that section as well”. Hence, the current state of affairs.
I really don’t think the cost of running it was even considered. It’s just an excuse some people make to justify paying for it. I’ve never seen anything from MS or Sony saying it. It has nothing to do with it. It’s just an extra thing they can charge for. The fact some people do try to justify it with “server costs” is sad. Every multiplayer game should be a subscription if that were the case, since they need to pay for their servers, but people wouldn’t make an excuse for them. The fact the console users want to justify using a console sucks.
I think it’s simply a side-effect of the current state of gaming, which sucks more than people generally consider. We’ve been getting nudged here slowly over a generation, so it doesnt feel hot to most of us. I’m bitter though and i hold grudges. im old too, so listen to me while i shake my cane!
Everything the game companies currently do with their IPs (locking games to their own servers and charging us for the privilege for example) is all about maintaining complete control of their IP. Remember that fucking lawyer-ese we all have to check-off so we can play the game we paid for? the part where they call what we’re getting a ‘licence’? Yeah, this is what it looks like when we don’t own the things we buy.
If the subscription costs were truly about the cost of running the servers then another option for companies would be to allow for us to make and host our own servers. The fact that a precious few game companies even allow us to host servers long after a game’s natural lifetime is over means that they prefer this outcome. When they have control over the servers they get to control the game’s lifetime.
Could them cats running Modern Warfare 29 or whatever we’re on now keep releasing the same fucking game every year if players were allowed to host their own private servers for the games they bought? No way, right? That’s the reason they do private servers, it is more profitable for them to do so.
Now if you made it this far, you’re thinking
Hey old-head!! That doesn’t really answer the question of why we pay for the privilege of paying twice, the thread you’re responding to! did all that leaded gasoline go to your boomerbrain?
first of all kiddo the newspaper that i still read says i’m a xennial or some bullshit so get off the lawn i’ll never own and second is i actually don’t know. I suspect we pay for it because we can get fucked. The fact we pay is ancillary to the whole control thing. they just do it because now that we’re locked in, they can and thats all there is to it
I love paying for nintendo online so I can play splatoon 3 which runs on fucking p2p
