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Xbox Live Cracks 6 Million, Windows Cost Revealed
Kotaku offers up a Microsoft press release on the unexpectedly early arrival of 6,000,000 players to the Xbox Live service. Along with some rather odd statistics to pass on (over 2,300,000,000 hours in-game time spent on the network already), there are some very interesting numerical tidbits passed on. An astonishing 70% of Live users have purchased a title from the Xbox Live arcade. Nearly half of all users hit the Marketplace at least once a session. This all has to add up to good news, financially, for Microsoft; but are they overreaching? GameInformer reports on pricing for Live on Windows Vista. Gold-level service is exactly the same as on the Xbox ($19.99 for three months), while Silver is free. Encouragingly, if you're already a Gold member on the 360 the same will be true on your PC. Just the same, the company is now charging for services normally taken for granted as a freebie on the PC platform.
I can't say that I'm too bothered by this. I have had all kinds of headaches with online play over the years, and if Live on Vista works as well as it does on XBOX, then its a welcome change. I think that too often game developers take the online portion of their games for granted because it doesn't generate revenue. Hopefully this is a step forward, not back.
let's not kid ourselves. no one i know bought the xbox to play dashboard games or to frak around with the other "content" or bells and whistles it offers. i've never seen anyone play the dashboard games other than secondary users like girlfriends and non-gamer types who are passing the time while the gamer is doing something else. the *only* reason i bought a Live account is to be able to play Gears online and maybe Halo2 sometimes. i'm not interested in anything else MS has to offer and all the logging in, profiling, clicking around trying to find this or that, etc, just takes away from length of my gaming time (which is inversely proportional to my age, it seems). also, i think the Live interface is clunky, counter-intuitive and needlessly bloated, just like most MS products. it's an added insult that we have to pay to simply connect up a few clients over internet to play. Tribes and Tribes2 were both games so much ahead of their times in this respect...the interface told you what you needed to know, had friend management and real-time server/ping updates and was frakking FREE (and i'm not talking about the Tribes2 browser feature nobody used, just the server/game listing). so, in a nutshell, MS has done what corporations are good at doing: inserted a needless layer of crap into an experience that would otherwise still work without it, just so they could charge for it (i say this about gaming and corporate operations, ever notice how big companies insert layers of middle management everywhere to "streamline" things?).
Or by online gamers do they include Silver members downloading something?
What is so compelling about the MS service to justify forking out $50 to use it when the same can be had for free elsewhere?
The same reason it's always been to fork over $50 for Xbox Live - quality of service.
You've listed only one pro for PC multiplayer, and that is the free-ness (as in beer) of it all. Personally I can think of a couple more:
- Support for user mods.
- Text chatting... but that's more a hardware difference than a service one.
Allow me to explain why I believe Xbox Live is worth every penny:
- Global friends lists and enemies lists: Every single game I play on the service is tied to the same friend and foe lists. If I meet a very annoying player, I can blacklist him, making sure I do not get paired up with him *ever again* in *any game that I play*.
- Tighter profanity control: When I get on CS I am hit with a wall of prepubescent vulgarity. On Xbox Live users that swear excessively get bad reviews, are less likely to get paired up with you. At the extreme end there is an active system that will ban such players. With free PC multiplayer everything is at the server level. For every vulgar n00b that gets banned off a particular server there's a million more just waiting to log in.
- Skill based rankings: Ever notice in online shooters that the scoreboard always has a few top players that duke it out, while everyone is just cannon fodder? On Live the TrueSkill system will attempt to place you with others of similar skill, ensuring that as you improve your game so do your opponents. Gunning down hapless newbies isn't fun for too long, nor is getting your ass handed to you every time you spawn.
- Guaranteed availability: This one is not intrinsically unique to Live, but I've yet to see a PC game do this well. On PC I'd surf huge lists of servers to pick the game I wanted. This I find annoying but necessary - there are a ridiculous number of laggy servers out there, if I don't manually pick one odds are it's going to suck. On XBL I can trust the "Quick Match" feature to put me in a good game. Many on PC have tried, all that I have seen have failed.
- Instant join for friends and games: I turn on my Xbox. My buddy John is playing Gears of War. He sees me come online through a quick message on his screen. He pauses his game, hits his menu, and bam, he's invited me to play. Networks like Steam have this feature also, but... how many games does Steam have again (especially just counting the ones that people care about)? XBL enables this feature across the board for *every game you play*.
- Play type preference: On XBL there are 3 "zones" of play: Rec, Pro, and Underground. These zones have slightly different rules, and are designed to segregate casual gamers from competitive ones. Some people play some games religiously and demands squad tactics from all their fellow players. Others are just there to unwind and shoot aliens. On a PC I've run into this problem repeatedly. The only solution is to bookmark servers that you know fits your play "style"... Both time consuming and annoying. Of course popular servers tend to fill up, so you're right back to "refresh server list, find good server... attempt to join".
I can't think of much else off of my tired, groggy head. But there are plenty of reasons to go from free online play to paid services. As long as you're getting your money's worth.
If I play a game with someone that I like, I can instantly get a list of the games they play online cross references with the games that I play online, tag them as a friend - I can be notified in-game when they log on and log off, And with in 3 seconds invite them to the game I am hosting while I am still playing. Or, when I log in, I can go to my list of friends, see what they are playing right now, and instantly join their game sessions if they have open slots. All of this functionality is integrated with the game itself.
If I don't like a person I am playing with, I can tag them as someone I don't like, and when I search for game sessions, the games that they are playing in won't show up in my list (nor will they be able to join the games I am hosting). And if they are being assholes, yelling racist slurs or whatever (which is super common in online play on the PC), I can report them - and a microsoft employee will investigate, listen to audio to see if the person was actually saying stuff that violates the TOS, and ban the player (and that account is tied to their credit card and xbox serial number, so it is no small thing to create another account).
And, voice chat is a standardized part of online play. Everyone on xbox live is expected to have voice chat hardware, and the functionality is integrated with the game and the system. Everyone playing is able to communicate via voice, the voice settings are part of the game session settings (I can set if I want dead players to be allowed to speak with live players in the same menu where I set respawns, for example... in some games you can set if opposing teams are allowed to communicate or if all communications are in-team).
I gave up online gaming on the PC for online gaming with xbox live, because there is nothing like xbox live on the PC. If I had to go back to online gaming PC style, I would just give up online gaming. I would pay $100 a year for xbox live, never mind $50 a year.