[QUOTE="G-Legend"]
[QUOTE="nyc05"]
Hell no.
Beyond the fact that I don't really play online anyway, there is simply no excuse for Sony (or Microsoft) to charge to play online. If the PC offers free online play that runs better, often feature free DLC, not to mention mod support, then I see no reason that console manufacturers should charge.
NeoGen85
Agreed, the thing is, I think Sony CAN offer those same things for free, they'd just have to do it differently, hopefully in the near future they will add similar friend things like that. The one thing sony desperately needs is in-game chatroom, if they had that, then PSN would definately be a lot closer to XBL, because it would act like a party feature and would allow you to talk to your friends whilst gaming.
To a degree that can be done inside Home, but I don't think you can form a party where everyone is voice chatting. When it comes down to it, Xbox Live Gold members are paying to maintain a service. You see, everything is run by Microsoft and the Xbox Live that's still available from the original black box was just expanded upon. This mean you can still download the extra content for Knights of the Old Republic, and even play Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge if you wanted too. This is a big plus for developers simply because they aren't paying money to maintain servers to provide gamers content. Because of this gamers are force to pay.
The Playstation Networkis notunifiedjust with communication, but every single game that has online multiplayer is hosted by the developer who created it instead of Sony. This is just one reason why Sony doesn't charge users a fee to play games online(or for other *&*^) simply because developers are paying money to host their servers instead of them. The only negative to this is that developers can take servers down if it's costing them more money to maintain it or the popularity of the game is low. For instance, on Xbox Live, Ace Combat 6 has no one playing online during the weekday, and you might find two online sessions during the weekend if you're lucky. If Namco had that game available on the PS3, I'm pretty sure the servers would have been shutdown already. This is a common trend for both PC, and past PS2 games. In fact, Dirge of Cerberus, Final Fantasy VII originally had a online multiplayer mode. It was removed from the NA version, and Square Enix shut down the servers to it in Japan halfway through the year.
There are a lot of PC games today who force users to connect toa developer'snetwork for copyright purposes in order to play online(even if it's free and peer to peer). Companies still have to pay for that. Of course if you have an illegal copy of a game, you can connect to a server created by another player. But he too his force to pay money in order to maintain. Bandwidth isn't free..
At the end of itdeveloperspay money to allow you to play games online for free on the PC and PS3. With Xbox Live you pay the moneydevelopers would have paid in order to maintain Microsoft's online service. That's also why developers aren't as hesistant to put DLC on Live either. Both the Sony and Microsoft do have a sort of one-time "installation" charge for developers putting content on their service. But as some of you just found out, Sony charges developers $0.16 per GB consumed bygamers for the first couple of months the content is on their network.
If Sony re-vamped they could do it through home. They could just run their system through home practically. Invites, game launching, chat, accessing the store, but it's seperate from PSN. That's a problem Sony either works on home or on PSN.
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