Official Live! prices announced

[scooby_dooby]

whats the difference between promotional cards or promotional weekends? it still allows you to sample it, without people being able to abuse it.

because with the passes you get a large chunk of time to test it out, 2 months is great. Especially when you buy a game every 2 or 3 months.

Much better then some random "weekend" that most users will probably be completely unaware of.

Maybe it's just me but I think the whole "special weekend" thing is totally lame.

Shifty Geezer - i understand that point, however xbox users have the option of using services like gamespy for free gaming, so it's win/win, select whatever option you find most appealing.

 

[Reznor007]

Blizzard runs all of Battle.net for free(aside from WoW), and updates their games to add new features frequently. For D2 they run ALL the major servers, store you character so you can play somewhere else, have online chat lobby/friends list etc, and in the latest patch(last month) a new super challenge was added amongst a few new items. Yet no charge at all.

 

[fallguy]

Because you play in their servers, create matchs in them, etc, so it's reasonable tu charge you for using their servers.

Playing a multiplayer game on the PS2 costs nothing. The Revolution will also not have any fees.

 

[DeathKnight]

Well i play a lot of bf 2 and i just play on EA servers. They don't charge anything for it.

They're still paying for it though. It's not like it doesn't cost them anything. However, they've probably figured a good chunk of the cost of upkeep to be covered by the profits from the game (and likely others which aren't online or don't have to be hosted through them). It's a business model. Microsoft's is going to be different than EA's, especially when there's end-user hardware involved in the grand scheme of things.

Playing a multiplayer game on the PS2 costs nothing. The Revolution will also not have any fees.

The majority of the games are likely P2P anyway, and there's no centralized hub either with PS2 that's keeping track of everything.

People continually want more and more something for nothing. There's only so much you can have for nothing.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Shifty Geezer - i understand that point, however xbox users have the option of using services like gamespy for free gaming, so it's win/win, select whatever option you find most appealing.

I didn't know this. Is this extending to XB360 too? I know all software has to be Live! aware. Anyone know if alternative portals are an option? If so that ought to be advertised! Otherwise people like me will be thinking it pay to play online only.

 

[mesyn191]

Blizzard runs all of Battle.net for free(aside from WoW), and updates their games to add new features frequently. For D2 they run ALL the major servers, store you character so you can play somewhere else, have online chat lobby/friends list etc, and in the latest patch(last month) a new super challenge was added amongst a few new items. Yet no charge at all.

Its only free in the sense that there are no monthly payments, Blizz just included the cost of running the servers into the retail price of the game.

Also for all the non-WoW games on BNet the bandwidth usage is minimal (designed with 14.4 modems in mind IIRC...), so is storage space (something like 1 or 2MB according to the Blizzhackers), and the chat room bandwidth usage is so minimal that they could offer it for free...

FYI all PC games cost money to go online, its just that with the PC gaming model the player doesn't always have to pay so long as others pay out of thier own pockets to host a game (that is where all those servers that you see come from BTW, people are paying anywhere from $50 to $190 a month to host games on them depending on the number of people the server can support, bandwidth usage, up keep, and other hosting options they get).

As far as I'm concerned all the people complaining about the $60 a year charge for Live! are just making mountians out of molehills and are probably just people looking for reasons to put down X360...

 

[Powderkeg]

Blizzard runs all of Battle.net for free(aside from WoW), and updates their games to add new features frequently. For D2 they run ALL the major servers, store you character so you can play somewhere else, have online chat lobby/friends list etc, and in the latest patch(last month) a new super challenge was added amongst a few new items. Yet no charge at all.

Yes, but can you be playing a Blizzard game on Battle.net and receive a game invite from a friend who is playing Doom 3? Does Battle.net provide a friends list that can be accessed and used by every single online PC game? Does Battle.net support video chat?


The reason Xbox Live costs money is because it is a service that is supported equally by every online Xbox game, not just a couple of games that MS makes. There is no PC equivelent, so it is impossible to make any comparisons.

 

[Guden Oden]

In addition, there are a growing number of PC games that charge more per game than live does.

Short of MMOs and such, what games exactly are you talking about?

The only PC games that are free for online play are Guild Wars and Joint Ops.

Um, you're joking, right?

The reason it's incomprehensible why you'd have to pay for XBL is A: most games on XBL don't run on any MS-owned servers, but rather on the consoles themselves, so why should I pay for it, and B: I already paid (a lot) of money to MS when I bought the game itself, surely that's more than enough to cover the minor network traffic generated by running a master server to scan for available online games (that are all run on other peoples' clients, using their network bandwidth)?

Check with any software vendor, the profit margins on games aren't very large at all. The biggest chunk by far of purchase cost is the price the store has to pay for each unit.

In comparison, you could have done like me and bought Diablo2 in june 2000 for $50 and played almost constantly online for about three years without paying a single dime extra.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

There are people who have Live and realize that it's completely worth the $5/month to have, and others who are too cheap or don't know what they're talking about. It's hard to reconcile these points of view.

How many people here have had Xbox Live and cancelled it because it was too expensive?

 

[Guden Oden]

and others who are too cheap or don't know what they're talking about

That's not a very constructive point of view. In fact, it's what's usually called "flamebait", though I'm sure most here are too intelligent to not go for it.

How many people here have had Xbox Live and cancelled it because it was too expensive?

The discussion isn't wether XBL is "too expensive" or not, but rather that MS is charging for things that either really don't cost them any money at all, or that others provide completely free of charge. But if you don't mind constantly paying small amounts of cash without getting any more in return than those who can play for free, why not accept a subscription for the console itself as well then? I'm sure if it was no more than $5 a month, you wouldn't feel it was too much.

Btw, you really loved the original divx system as well, didn't you? Paying in perpetuity for stuff you've already bought, that's just great isn't it?

 

[Mefisutoferesu]

That's it insult the opposing opinion by calling them cheap and saying "they don't know what they're talking about". That won't piss anyone off... nooooo.

Let me explain my out look, and you tell me what I should do?

My genres of choice

1) RPG (non MMO)
2) Action
3) Fighting

Now if I play a game online with other living people more than likely it will be to play a fighting game. I usually stick to 1 or 2 fighting games at any time (usually 1 2d and 1 3d). However, I spend most of my time just going through story mode and doing whatever there is to do, only once in a while do I strole down to the arcade to play real people. I'll be doing the same thing online, once maybe twice a month, lets say, I'll want to play someone online in, say, GGX2. More over, I'll probably want to DL any patches or updates that come out for my various games that I buy, hopefully I won't be sold any broken games and the whole PC problem won't repeat on the consoles as well.

That's my profile for online gaming. What do you think I should do? How much should I pay, or not? What services should I want?

 

[Apoc]

Short of MMOs and such, what games exactly are you talking about?


Um, you're joking, right?

The reason it's incomprehensible why you'd have to pay for XBL is A: most games on XBL don't run on any MS-owned servers, but rather on the consoles themselves, so why should I pay for it, and B: I already paid (a lot) of money to MS when I bought the game itself, surely that's more than enough to cover the minor network traffic generated by running a master server to scan for available online games (that are all run on other peoples' clients, using their network bandwidth)?

Check with any software vendor, the profit margins on games aren't very large at all. The biggest chunk by far of purchase cost is the price the store has to pay for each unit.

In comparison, you could have done like me and bought Diablo2 in june 2000 for $50 and played almost constantly online for about three years without paying a single dime extra.

IIRC, all games servers are running in microsoft servers, not in the consoles. I created a game in my xbox with only 100 kbits upload and 16 players got into it and the average lag was 50. This is not possible in that connection, this is why xbox live cost money.

 

[scooby_dooby]

You're paying for a consistent experience and the quality assurance that comes with making you game Live! enabled.

Online experiences are frequently better on XBOX than PS2 and that's because of the existence of live, games perform better, the friends system spans the entire network, it has voicechat, on x360 you will have regular tournaments, you will have prizes, you will have video chat.

This argument you're paying for nothing is pretty lame, I think it's obvious what you're a paying for, you're paying for a very wide feature set, as well as a certain level of quality in the online experience.

Anyways, if you only have 1 game to play on live, then maybe it's not worth it. But what if you have 4 or 5? The more games you play the better deal it becomes.

 

[Mefisutoferesu]

Honestly, if there's just one game I want to play online then I'm never gonna pay the cash, so how exactly am I supposed to get "hooked" on onlone gaming? Play one for a while and get used to it and then get a hankering to expanding out into new games. You're cutting off the newbies for the sake of the harcore. That's not how you expand online gaming on a console.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Actually most casuals will have no problem buying a 1 month or 3 month card for $8, or $20 at their local gamestore.Also, in the past games have come with free trials, we don't know if that trend will continue, but it was a very effective way of letting you 'try it out'

 

[fallguy]

The majority of the games are likely P2P anyway, and there's no centralized hub either with PS2 that's keeping track of everything.

People continually want more and more something for nothing. There's only so much you can have for nothing.

I only played Madden on my old PS2. And it kept record of my wins, etc. If I remember correctly. There is no way right now of knowing how Nintendo is going to do their online playing.

It would just be nice if there was an option to play, without paying. Perhaps with no stats or whatever. When 2 out of 3 systems will have free online play.. it makes it hard to justify it, at least for me. Sure its just $5, but there are a lot of things in life that are just $5 extra a month. Options for cell phones.. different cable options, etc. It all adds up.

 

[Reznor007]

Yes, but can you be playing a Blizzard game on Battle.net and receive a game invite from a friend who is playing Doom 3? Does Battle.net provide a friends list that can be accessed and used by every single online PC game? Does Battle.net support video chat?


The reason Xbox Live costs money is because it is a service that is supported equally by every online Xbox game, not just a couple of games that MS makes. There is no PC equivelent, so it is impossible to make any comparisons.

Well, you can chat with people playing different Blizzard games. Also, if I'm playing one game, do I really want an invite to a different one? And I don't want video chat while I'm playing a game.

 

[Reznor007]

Its only free in the sense that there are no monthly payments, Blizz just included the cost of running the servers into the retail price of the game.

Also for all the non-WoW games on BNet the bandwidth usage is minimal (designed with 14.4 modems in mind IIRC...), so is storage space (something like 1 or 2MB according to the Blizzhackers), and the chat room bandwidth usage is so minimal that they could offer it for free...

All B.net supported games at launch prices:
Diablo2 -$50
Diablo2: LOD -$40
Starcraft -$50
Starcraft: Broodwar -$40
Warcraft 3 -$50
Warcraft 3:TFT -$40
Warcraft 2:B.net edition -$20
Diablo 1-$50
9+ years of online play(starting from Diablo 1) $0
Total $340

If I payed for 9 years of Xbox Live with no games at all it would cost me $450(going by yearly rates)

Xbox games cost around the same at launch, and most of the Battle.net games are $20 or less now. Blizzard also has the ladder system that resets every few months and winners get prizes, also at no charge.

Iif Blizzard includes a lifetime of free service into their normally priced PC games, why can't MS?

 

[NavNucST3]

Lets keep this simple.
For those of you that don't want Live!, don't buy it.
For those of us that want Live!, buy it.
For those who have never tried it, use you gold trial period to see if you like it, if you like it or dont like it follow one of the above methods.

$4.18/month = annual subscription to Live!

Lets talk about this free vs. pay thing.

Cable/Satellite TV, IIRC one of the home theater mags quoted a survey that here in the U.S. only 35% of the pop. uses OTA. If one believes that survey that would indicate that the PAY service is preferred to the FREE OTA. I would also say that the number of Tivo and ReplayTV owners is greater than the number of VHS or set-top DVDR owners (in the context of actively time-shifting), again an example where a paid subscription service seems to outpace the Free (when not considering hardware costs) method of setting your vcr to record a show. While XM/Sirius doesn't outpace the number of people that listen to free radio, for my personal experience, however, I have no issues whatsoever with the cost of my XM subscription, because I get a much better experience from paid radio than free radio.

Each of those services I pay for cost more than Live! some of them cost /month what Live! costs per year; my cable bill alone is 2.25 years of Live! /month.

The paradigm shift didn't happen with Live!, it happened when people decided to start paying $1-2 for water and $3-5 for coffee.

Without wanting to sound too much like a MSFT parrot, it does get to be about choice at one point or another.

 

[Reznor007]

Of course, with cable/satellite you get dozens-hundreds of channels, sometimes with digital surround audio, compared to 5-10 OTA channels of usually crappy quality...

DVR's are preferred because there is no tape to change or rewinding, etc.

What does Live offer over standard free gaming on PC's or PS2? Ability to do "microtransactions"(a term I hate...) and spend even more?