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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.
And you think it's cheap to run cloud computing data centres?
Yes, especially for a simple lobby server. Not much "computing" in that "cloud data center".
Yeah my bad. I'm dyslexic and read the "could" in the meme as "cloud" and thought it was talking about Microsoft gamepass cloud stuff.
Doesn't matter where it started the point is that most pc gaming can be done without a subscription
They provided years of content, dedicated support and actively stopped glitches and hacking. Paying for solid service and no hackers can be beneficial.