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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services, and it’s wild to expect them to be. You wouldn’t expect a landscaping business to do all your landscaping for free after you pay for the first time.
I don't expect to have to pay another company to walk across my own lawn
Alright, then play games where you can host your own server. There are plenty. That doesn’t work for all games though (particularly ranked games where the server software has to be verified or people could easily cheat), so you’ll be limited in what you can play.
I'm not super familiar with current console allowances, but are you suggesting that people can just "host their own server" and not pay the psn or Xbox live fees that are forced onto them? I just don't think that's true. You have to pay the fee to connect to any server, even your own.
This was more about general gaming, but you can connect to some games online without a subscription on Xbox. Not all.
The problem is that there aren’t plenty. Every year number of online games that allow you to host your own server decreases.
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it's wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren't a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most "servers" were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They're a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
In my comment I mentioned about the game costing more to cover the cost of multiplayer servers. So that’s already been covered.
And the subscription costs pay for tools for developers to build specifically for Xbox, like https://developer.microsoft.com/en-US/games/publish
tell me more about how landscaping with physical labor and materials is just like having a server turned on
They both require money.
Electricity is not free, hardware is not free, engineering and maintenance is not free, and an internet connection is not free.
Explain all the free to play games then.
Loss leaders to get you to do mtx. I don't even disagree with your larger point but that's not a good rebuttal.
Microtransactions.