I'm amazed that you're this adamant about the prospect of paying for a service. Am I to take this that streaming services like Netflix and Hulu are a farce as well? Keeping in mind, I was also against the 360 crowd because of that pay-for prospect. Now, however, I have a gaming PC with 500 Steam games (none of them I actually OWN, remember you're buying a license), and equally about 75 games on my Xbone that I've gotten over the last 24 months for my Gold subscription.
How would Netflix and Hulu be a farce? Both replace existing financial institutions and are merely the next evolution in decades-old businesses.
Netflix has already taken its place as the next evolution of Blockbuster. They took the video rental business and simply did it better: no drop boxes, no late fees, and a far larger catalog of content than could typically be contained in a single Blockbuster Video location.
Hulu began its life as a place for big TV networks to dip their toes in to online distribution of their content and today it helps contribute to so called “cord-cutting” practices as traditional television as we know it is slowly abandoned in favor of networked libraries of internet content. Again, it’s just the next evolution of an established standard.
Xbox Live, on the other hand, fought against the established standard. The established standard for multiplayer was “the developer pays for the server infrastructure themselves out of the game’s production budget” and the player pays nothing. This largely worked because for the longest time multiplayer on the PC was incredibly simplistic: players would run the servers themselves, which would then ping a master server that catalogued a list of active games being played online so it could tell other players where to connect.
Microsoft spun this around and did a bunch of magic jazz hands about matchmaking and their “TrueSkill™ ranking system.” Instead of leaving it up to players to browse a list of servers for themselves, you hit one button and the service connects you to a random game and hopefully everything works out. That, supposedly, was the original value of Xbox Live Gold, is that it was a simple “hit go and it works” system.
But this all goes back to Microsoft controlling the pricing structure and the concept of “perceived value.” On the PC, you have a free market. Anyone can put out anything. Nobody tells you how to price your game, so you can just do whatever.
Now, imagine somebody on the PC starts their own multiplayer subscription service. Since there’s no structure there that says you HAVE to pay for the subscription, you can very easily choose not to pay and move on to other products that don’t require the sub. This actually happened: Microsoft tried to bring Xbox Live Gold to the PC, in the form of Games For Windows Live Gold. If you wanted to play “Games For Windows” branded PC games online (Shadowrun, Halo 2, etc.), you had to buy a Gold subscription.
It lasted less than nine months. Nobody was buying a GFWL Gold sub, not when 99% of the existing library of PC games could be played online for free, with better and more robust options. For a paid subscription service to exist there, you’d have to provide exclusive features that are worth paying for, and Steam does everything GFWL promised for the low, low price of $0. Microsoft couldn’t compete with that, so they were forced to concede.
On a game console, the circumstances are completely different. You remember how I said “perceived value” was about establishing a precedent for digital content that has no physical worth? On the Microsoft Xbox, they are the precedent. Steam doesn’t exist. The market isn’t free. Nobody is allowed to say, “I don’t want to charge for my multiplayer because you catch more flies with honey” on an Xbox. You have to follow Microsoft’s lead.
And with the Xbox 360, Microsoft made a lot of right moves. A lot. Whereas Sony was over there creeping people out with android babies reverse-crying, Microsoft took an early lead and was hard to catch. And since they were the ones setting the precedents for multiplayer on a console, even though they were going against the established PC standard, Xbox Live Gold still stuck. You played by Microsoft’s rules or you didn’t play at all because there was no alternatives.
This wasn’t Netflix building a better video rental service to usurp the aging Blockbuster. Xbox Live Gold was a straight up regression, but there were no other choices.
Think of it this way: If Netflix was bad and unfair, people would’ve just kept using Blockbuster. But Netflix was legitimately better, and that’s why it succeeded.
Steam does literally everything Xbox Live Gold can do – party voice chat, matchmaking, arcade leaderboards, video streaming, achievements, all of it. For free.
But you can’t get Steam on an Xbox. So either you pay, or you do without. That’s the trick.
Games for Windows Live Gold gives us hints of a world that could have existed: one where Xbox Live Gold was a failure, where Microsoft was forced to make the service free because nobody wanted to pay for it.
Instead, the Xbox Live marketing engineers earned their paychecks, and they did it by taking yours.
