[QUOTE="Ket87"][QUOTE="InvertedOutput"]Yes, but very few of the PC games servers are hosted by the actual company. A lot of servers you join on games like counter-strike and TF2 and the sorts are privately owned and hosted servers, of which specific people have admin and the sorts. Someone out there is paying for the server. Or so, I have been raised to believe.
VoodooHak
Yes someone pays for those dedicated servers out of their own pockets on PC but what the hell do we pay Microsoft for on the 360? What is it for them to store all of our Gamer Card info, update the marketplace, add new advertisements to the blades on the dashboard? Microsoft has all the games use person to person matches with one players internet to act as a host server, its virtually maintence free and doesn't cost MS a nickel.
We pay for:
- Infrastructure that allows the community to self-govern with
- Gamer zone
- Rep
- Prefer/avoid
- Feedback - there is a team spread out globally to monitor feedback and participate in multiplayer matches to police the system
- 2 levels of matchmaking:
- Preference-based with the features listed above
- Skill-based using the proprietary TruSkill system
- Functional cross-game invite system that brings you straight into a friend's session
- Closed, secure network that actively checks for modded consoles
- Compared to the competition, MS seems to be the best connected to its community
- Then there's MS personnel dedicated to the Xbox Live community like Major Nelson and Trixie
- They have MVP, Ambassador and Community Developer Programs. See the gamercards in our sigs? MS didn't make those. But they do have their programmers help community sites.
- Community Calendar with Ladies Night, Prime Time and Family Game Night, Play with Devs, Game With Fame
All of those things you just mentioned are things that the entire infrastructure of the system is built before anyone ever played. They don't need to keep up things like GamerZone because all that is is just a word on your gamer card it doesn't do anything. Once Rep and Prefer avoid is implemented it is essentially self sustaining because once the infrastructure is their on the system every thing is automatic. Cross game invite is the same, the community is built from the ground up before anyone ever signed on it isn't something that needs to be tinkered with after that unless they do a dashboard update. The whole Major Nelso and Trixie buisness is something that is frivolous and useless, I don't think our money every year should go to Major Nelson so he can keep a blog and make a few short videos here and there. Point being is every point you made other than the Live Community Major Nelson stuff are things that Microsoft developed before 360 launched and requires little to no maintaining because it is all automatic. There isn't some guy deep beneath Microsoft headquarters filing everyones Rep reports and preferred players. There was a computer built that handles all that stuff automatically, if your saying our money goes towards keeping it plugged then fine.
It is alright that we pay, it gets us things like the annual updates and patches etc, but it is overpriced compared to how much work the actual infrastructure of Live requires since most things are automatic. Maybe if part of our subscription went to keeping the system updated and the other portion went to keeping game servers going than $50 is fine. But really we should only have to pay like $20 for what we get out of the deal.
The community gamer nights do you really think it costs them money? All they do is put a message up on Xbox.com saying hey all girls play this game this night, or families play this game this night. Thats it, thats all it is. For how blindly loyal you seem to be to Microsoft how can you not know that?
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