this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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This has always been my sole reason for never buying a console.
I mean subscription gaming properly started on the PC with MMOs
-and I say this as a mainly PC gamer. I remember thinking how insane it was that my friend paid monthly to play the new Warcraft game..this of course before I understood what server costs were
To be fair, running servers for MMOs wasn't cheap. Network cost alone could be quite high, not to mention the storage and backup they'd have to keep rolling in order to ensure small blackouts or crashes didn't doom months of player progress.
That's completely different from what microsoft offered with the xbox, which was effectively a master lobby server to find matches. Little processing and networking needed.
This.
I have no problem subscribing for a (good) MMO. The extreme development times, investments and high performance servers as well as (somewhat) frequent content updates as well as long lifespan makes the subscription worth it.
But when a subscription provides nothing else than access to simple features or low-performnace/unoptimized servers then I cannot understand why it would be needed. Sure there are operating costs but today you can literally just do peer to peer hosting. No need for devs to host anything. And with full control of their consoles they could even validate the clients creating the lobbies. The added cost for online gaming is the worst scam Microsoft invented.