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What if I told you servers cost money. No servers, no online gaming.
yet somehow it's free on PC, hmmmmm
Ah right, good point. Perhaps the cost calculations work differently then. Consoles are much cheaper to buy than PCs because the manufacturers expect to make money on their subscription services. I'm pretty sure neither Microsoft nor Sony make any profit on selling the hardware, but they have to make profit somewhere.
They profit through the 30% cut on any software sale. The cost equation for online subscriptions is as follows:
"Can we get away with it?" "Yes we can" The end.
On PC they can't get away with it because there's no single company controlling everything, so you either get every single company asking for an online subscription, you find other ways to monetize. Closest so far is Microsoft's game subscription thingy and others like that. It's not the same, but I'm pretty sure that's the only way they've managed to convince enough people to pay a subscription on PC for now.
Well, save your money and buy a PC then.
To be fair almost every popular multiplayer game has online micro transactions or a premium subscription model.
It feels free from your perspective but there are a chunk of users paying for the servers under the Pareto principle.