This type of thread is really getting old. You are not forced to buy a 360 and pay for XBL. Go ahead and buy a PC/PS3/Wii and quit crying. Then again, if your complaining about $50 a year, I guess you cant buy the other systems. Oh well, it seems like people dont know how to make good purchases.

I would like to be teleported into a Hentai gamecode-hunter

lol good idea

[QUOTE="RedMasterDX"]I miss the RPGs of the PS1. Good times......EnderSR388

I loved Chrono Cross, one of my favorite RPGS on any system.

Yeah that was a awesome game. To be quite honest I just cant get into most of the real time action games of this gen. They also seem to put too much into graphics and cut scenes then into the story and length. I guess they want to make RPGs that casuals can finish in a short time. Dang it.

Some people have no idea how good they have it.

strayzilla

QFT. Here we are reading about people complaining about the fee for XBL while some poor soul in some 3rd-world country is dying of starvation and never had the chance to experience video gaming.

:P

On a side note, there's never a price too high for someone's life.

[QUOTE="Steppy_76"]Think long term viability. The more money that PSN ends up costing Sony the less they're going to throw their weight behind it...esecially when the losses will increase as the users increase. When you charge and make money from something you have to and WANT to continue to improve to increase your profits. HuusAsking

Steppy made a good point saying that if PSN started costing Sony more and more money, they're going to put less in it. To me, it seems like Sony is just using it as a marketing tactic to draw in customers to their product since its free. Then when the customers become so accustomed to using that service, Sony can smack a price on it and the customers will pay.

A prime example is NetZero. For those who dont remember, they offered their service for free.It drew in a lot of customers with the free label, but then ads they hosted didnt cover their expenses. Now their charging.

Of course that scenario is a maybe, but the more money Sony puts into PSN (maintaining, updating, expanding), the higher chance that they would start charging for PSN. On the other hand, Sony can remain generous and keep it for free, but lets not forget this isnt the "perfect world" and Sony is run by humans, not machines. And your right that customers dont like paying twice for a product, but they still are willing to since they really like the service and are "commited" to it.

As for PSN or XBL being the superior service, Im not going to touch that because they are many different point of views about that. I'll just say that Im satisfied with XBL, and Im sure the XBL subscribers that play on it constantly are too. Neither are crap services since they are still here, obviously.

Well in that sense M$ doesnt require dedicated servers (even though as mentioned by others that they do) because they dont have much games that require the use dedicated servers. And a point stated by many XBL users before, they dont have connection problems or lag when hosting their own games. Millions of XBL subscribers hosting their own games without lag or use of dedicated servers is impressive feat of XBL. The fact of XBL having a large number of subscribers playing online goes to show you that its true, there's no denying numbers.

IMO if you require the use of dedicated servers to play all your games lag-free, then that doesnt say much about your own internet connection

[QUOTE="RedMasterDX"]

Like I said before, the servers hold your demos, updates, and pretty much everything else that you can access on XBL. They store all of this on servers and these servers push it out to the 360. Dont think they are only for acting as dedicated servers for gaming, they all perform different roles.

Like MSN have email servers just for the purpose of holding your email accounts, another server for their web pages and whatever.

If M$ was to hold dedicated servers for all games, you can bet everything that they would charge a lot more than $50 a year. More servers means more cost, which means they would charge you more.

IMO the $50 a year is not a bad deal, but not a good one either since free is always better. I dont own a PS3, but from what I read from the forums it seems M$ gets out content and new features quicker than PS3. But then again XBL has a bit too much ads. But then I wonder how redundant PSN is if it were to crash. Since it doesnt cost anything, does that mean it wont be reliable in case of a network crash?

HuusAsking

I dont know much about PSN, but do you have a link for the dedicated first party servers thing? Not saying your wrong but I would like to read about it before I say anything. Also does PSN have ads displaying like XBL? That would be one way. One guess is that since Sony deals with other things besides gaming consoles, they're just supporting it through profit from their other products. Sony would be more generous in this sense compared to M$ (notice I've been using the $ for M$ lol :P).

[QUOTE="GazzaB"][QUOTE="RedMasterDX"]

I just want to throw this in but can we stop calling XBL a peer-to-peer network? It's pretty much self ownage to anyone that uses this term to describe XBL. A P2P network consists only of nodes (such as Windows XP computers) that are configured to share information or processes with other nodes. When it comes to games, yes you may be hosting your own games for others to join, but that doesnt mean that your not in a client-server network.

The xbox360 in a sense is a client in the XBL network. The XBL network is maintained by M$'s severs :shock:. These servers are where you get your demos, updates, dlc, etc. and also allows you to communicate with other xbox360s. Also since your part of the XBL network, M$ can ban your account, censore your motto and whatever, since your xbox360 is a client to their server. And in this network you can either be automatically joined to a dedicated server hosted by the game's company or act as your own, since there can be multiple servers in a network.

So is someone's 360 pushing out all the updates, demos etc.? I think not.

And no im not trying to support/pwn XBL with this post.

HuusAsking

True, M$ supposedly spent over $500 million setting up servers in US, UK and Japan. Its not as if M$ are doing nothing yet charging for the service.

Like I said before, the servers hold your demos, updates, and pretty much everything else that you can access on XBL. They store all of this on servers and these servers push it out to the 360. Dont think they are only for acting as dedicated servers for gaming, they all perform different roles.

Like MSN have email servers just for the purpose of holding your email accounts, another server for their web pages and whatever.

If M$ was to hold dedicated servers for all games, you can bet everything that they would charge a lot more than $50 a year. More servers means more cost, which means they would charge you more.

IMO the $50 a year is not a bad deal, but not a good one either since free is always better. I dont own a PS3, but from what I read from the forums it seems M$ gets out content and new features quicker than PS3. But then again XBL has a bit too much ads. But then I wonder how redundant PSN is if it were to crash. Since it doesnt cost anything, does that mean it wont be reliable in case of a network crash?