Considering that this is the only article I’ve seen about this, I’m pretty sure it’s not true. Even the article itself says at the end “it seems really unrealistic”.
I think you’re getting upset over something that isn’t actually happening, especially when they said earlier in the year you wouldn’t need a subscription.
It’s not fair at all. You’re the ones who choose to continue to game on console and pay Xbox Live fees. Many games that have both PC ports and Xbox ports have free online on PC.
This is certain to kill the game’s PC port before it comes out. Chopping off necessary features and hiding them behind a paywall is a terrible anti-consumer practice, and certainly kills my interest in playing it.
You clearly know nothing at all about PC games.
PC games have had free online play since the original Doom back in 1993 (likely before you were even born), and have been doing it LONG before consoles were even uttered in the same breath. If you think Valve is going to start charging a subscription fee you are hilariously ignorant of how the PC gaming infrastructure works.
Games have also tracked steeply upward in development overhead since Doom, whereas sales prices have remained stagnant (or, taking into account inflation, become cheaper!) within the last two decades. Also, participation rates and overhead for online games infrastructure have likely gone up substantially for many reasons (capacity, game complexity, security…) from where they were back in the '90s. You’re applying assumptions which worked out back in the day to the (troubled) state of the industry now.
Also, the attempts to dig at my presumed age are not only petty, but misguided. Not only was I alive back in '93, I was also playing Doom.
I’d hope Valve will look at it in terms of which components of their business model are seeing them bleed money and which are producing insane profits to cover for it, and adjust accordingly – you know, like a business with shareholder obligations and whatnot is kinda obliged to do. If not, then they basically get to coast along whilst developers continue to be hampered by a lack of any centralized subscriber model.
Valve is not a publicly traded company; they have no shareholders to answer to. They are in an incredibly unique position in the games industry. (Not sure if you knew that and were making a quip about how Valve should act or not)
Also, most servers for games sold on Steam are not run by Valve. I’m not sure who we should be paying a central subscription fee to? I’m playing a lot of Rocket League right now, for example. Psyonix, the RL developer, runs those servers (and they are cross-play with the PS4 version). They seem to be making tons of money off the reasonably priced DLC right now to not only keep the servers running but also add more servers in more regions.
Didn’t, but I was more going for the “market forces getting the big corporation to do the right thing for once” angle.
That’s almost the point: Valve should provide a subscriber service to act as a middle-man for paid online services for developers, because users aren’t likely to provide billing details to every developer they use the online services of. As far as I know, that’s what Xbox Live was conceived for in the first place, although Xbox Live also has server infrastructure.
Rocket League has been a phenomenal success, so I don’t think they make for a great example in this case. And sure, developers can come up with other models for monetization which hook into their online services, but I’m not sure it’s ideal or particularly robust.
It’s true that Rocket League can’t be seen as the norm, but my point there was that the servers are cross-play, so they also serve PS4 users. If Valve is charging Psyonix to run middleware servers, there is probably a huge clash of interests here between Valve, Psyonix, and Sony that is not easily resolved. For super large games (like, say… Call of Duty), I imagine they would be so adamant to run their own servers that if Valve forced them to buy into the system, they’d fork off from Steam and create their own Origin-style service, and gamers have been pretty clear in their distaste for that sort of thing.
I think it’s an interesting point to consider, but I just don’t see how it isn’t extremely complicated in every way to get Valve to be the middleman for every game that requires a server that is sold on Steam, and then charge a monthly fee for it.
This article is bunk. Let’s wait until something actually happens or is even proposed before we fly off the handle.
MS makes lots of money from Live subscriptions. On Xbox, they offer a compelling service at a reasonable price and people are happy to pay it (or at least willing). Sony for years said they wouldn’t charge for online and the fanboys made a big deal out of it - then they switched over with the PS4. PC is very different. So we will see what they do. But one thing is the same - they need money from somewhere to support the games infrastructure. And believe me, somewhere within MS someone is pointing out the obvious “so we are porting our exclusive Xbox games to PC and Xbox requires a subscription but PC doesn’t. So we are incentivizing people to play on PC and not Xbox.” I’m glad I’m not the one who has to explain that to management in a satisfactory way. If they make a “baffling” decision on this it is going to be related to someone’s failure to explain the above to the satisfaction of management - whether that’s Phil Spencer or above.
I will say this is one of the many wrinkles that makes the “if only they release KI on PC it will get huge and there will be rainbows and unicorns!” Viewpoint a touch unrealistic. The PC game has to run perfectly on all hardware, look great, run at 4K on a Tandy with a 3.5" drive, have all the characters, allow mods, have no subscription fee, be truly free to play, be delivered by beautiful slave girls directly to PC players…
To quote Billy Dee Williams “this deal is getting worse all the time.” And if PC players don’t buy it, they will blame MS for not making it right. None of the thousands of PC fanboys who flooded these forums to vote “yes” and ■■■■ in the pool of existing Xbox players will be anywhere in sight.
I imagine this sort of thing is a part of why the console manufacturers weren’t so keen on cross-play for such a long time.
I’m not saying that Valve should set up servers. I just think a centralized payment model would be an easier front for the developers to defend this kind of change from. Certainly few developers have success setting up subscription models on their own.
Hm, if they required it for every game, including those already on the market and in peoples’ libraries, then they’d probably wind up in court, not to mention dealing with riots on the streets. I think the way to do it would be to get a wave of big upcoming games to sign on, get the ESA behind it…and then drop Half-Life 3 to Trojan horse the whole thing home and hope for the best.
That would be… pretty interesting, heh. Valve has a ton of goodwill (perhaps not all deserved, but certainly a LOT of it is) and they would be taking a massive, massive gamble with basically the entire future of their company by doing something like this. I think they would have to see the state of affairs being extremely dire to take on such a risk.
As for the cross-play thing, it does really suck that console manufacturers are so bull-headed about it, and it’s only the consumers that suffer, really. For example, Rocket League was just announced as an Xbox One title in February next year, but it won’t be joining the PC/PS4 player base because, obviously, Microsoft and Sony aren’t going to get along here. But what it means is that the Xbone version is now, definitively and unarguably, the worst version of the game. The only people who will play it there are people who have no other option, and they will be playing with 1/10th (if that) the number of players that are on the other servers. That kinda stinks, IMO.
I will redo the comment so here you go. When KI was announced for PC,Xbox players were mad because the Pc players didn’t have to pay for online. The reason was the Xbox players were mad because they care enough for the game to get gold,buy the game,and some even bought the Xbox One for it but Pc players don’t need to pay a subscription fee to play online at all so Xbox players thought it was unfair. We knew that it would increase the pkayerbase and make the game more enjoyable with cross platform play so we took accepted it(well most did I think). Then you decided to say that you didn’t want to play KI anymore just because they were considering a subscription fee. That seems a bit odd doesn’t it. Not wanting to play a game just because they considered(not decided) to add a subscription fee to play online does seem a bit selfish to the Xbox players.
On console games, yes, they’ve tracked steeply upward in development overhead. But that’s not the case with all PC games. Indie devs who have games with online play run their own servers, and also allow players to host their own servers as well. Valve even founded Steam on this policy since at the beginning of Steam’s life people were using it for Counter Strike and Valve had a feature to track servers that they still use today.
Most online games on Steam are either run by the company who have enough money to buy their own or rent them from a service, or are run by players who have their own resources to keep the servers alive. Valve does not spend anything on these servers. If need be, Valve even has its own servers that it can rent out to developers. They’re clearly doing great, and have been doing so for the past 11 years. There is no need at all for them to switch to a subscription model. The only devs that have the problem you describe are AAA developers who have large server costs due to their large player base - for them this should be the cost of doing business. They are the One-Percenters of Steam and can afford large server costs although will probably whine and drag their heels about it because it means they make less profit. They need to just suck it up.
Steam has a massive playerbase precisely because it’s free. Even people with non-gaming PCs are able to run Steam and connect with friends, and even for them there is a large selection of indie games with online play that their computers are able to run. Valve makes huge money off the indie games scene alone, which is substantially larger on PC than any other platform. All devs must agree to pay 30% of their sales to Valve which makes them huge money since the selection of games and the player base for Steam is VASTLY larger than the PlayStation/Xbox infrastructure.
Finally, you are a consumer, not a corporation. The fact that you’re arguing for a company suddenly enacting vampiric business practices out of nowhere is disturbing, like you have a vested interest in seeing them bleed money out of people. If you don’t that makes it all the more confusing. Microsoft has sold you a line about needing the money to uphold their servers - a problem that Nintendo, Sony or Valve don’t have. But rather than coming to the conclusion that you are being decieved by MS you instead come to the more irrational conclusion that all the other developers who don’t do this are “slow on the uptake”, that they should be doing it as well. But they have no reason to do this as they are already raking in tons of money and would only succeed in alienating their players. I understand why you’re saying other companies should do this, because you think it’s unfair that you have to pay for an online subscription due to backing Microsoft whereas everyone else simply doesn’t. It IS unfair, and you should be petitioning Microsoft to remove the fee, not asking other companies to add one to theirs. It makes no sense at all and shows backwards thinking on your part.
PC gamers have already paid their dues, as in, paid the most money to have the gaming platform with the most value for their money, so in a karmic sense it is their deserved right to play online for free.
