Dr_Cogent said:
There are also a number of people here who were used to having a hard drive being standard with our Xbox. Things change.
Also, never say never.
Live isn't about the games themselves. It's the interconnection between them. It's the matchmaking. It's the messaging. It's the friends list. It's the stats. It's all of the above.
See, it's this comment right here that tells me you don't get it
You have got to be kidding me. No MMO game is ever going to work like this. And don't give me Guild Wars as an example of a free MMO - because it's simply not an MMO. MMO's are built around having a constant revenue stream. They aren't ever going to let you pay 50 bucks and then play all year. No way in hell.
What don't I get? If you don't have one, get a myspace.com account. I wouldn't necessarily suggest you use it (b/c I'm not too hot on it), but there's a common interface and there's messaging and notification if a buddy is online. There's a visible friend's list with icons and comment page. There's "stats" which are basically anything you want to put down about yourself, but basic text storage. There's a blog. There's a bulletin board. There's an image gallery. And it's all free. It's a free matchmaking site. There are a million of these things around, myspace.com is just one I'm using as an example. Can't Live be free too, and then charge you extra to play MMOs?
And as for the MMOs, why not? You pay $50 a year, right? Didn't someone mention that WoW's monthly charge is for content-creation? If MS isn't creating the content, and merely running the servers, then I don't see what the problem is. $50 x 2M subscribers is $100M. I mean, most MMOs are $15/month, right? Why not a flat fee for all online gaming, including MMOs, and then you pay the microtransaction fees to get the extra content?
I'm not saying this is likely, none of my argument is about what's likely or not. What I'm arguing here is that the current system doesn't present much of a value at all. Matter of fact, it's a rip. All PPVs are a rip. Battlenet with Diablo did all of this stuff except for the buddy list. And even then, you could join a guild so you could have a regular group of friends to battle with. And best of all, it was totally free.
The cost of the game covers the development and the infrastructure. If you're paying for an online service, shouldn't it cover the online component as well? What does the $50 per year pay for on Live? Matchmaking? It certainly isn't necessary for server costs, right?
I understand this is a business, duh. But if there's to ever be an online userbase built, the same philosophy has to apply as is used for the hardware. If you want to grow that base, you need to present something of compelling value. To do that, you need to suck it up and make the cost of entry cheap enough (razors) that you can draw in the tens of millions of users you've already taken a loss for, and then find a way to make them then spend for the rest (razor blades) to generate revenue. Right now, they are trying to make profits off the subscriber base with a package that's not drawing anywhere near the hw install base.
The 360 silver package is interesting in this way in that it kinda half-asses it. You get online free for the marketplace and stuff, but you can't play the games until you pony up the bucks. If they plan on pushing microtransactions, they should probably try getting a much bigger sample size b/c the number of suckers isn't that high. If online communities stay in low millions again this gen, potential revenue will remain small. But maybe Live subscriptions represent higher profit margins than microtransactions, and so this is the balance point. I can understand that with individual software sales being closer to the size of the online community than the total hw userbase. Meh, I just don't like it (as if that wasn't already apparent). PEACE.
