So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.
We already discussed this. The Playstation Plus subscription isnt paying for internet infrastructure. PC has no monthly fee, and it’s infrastructure is exactly the same.
Oh I was… So Xbox game pass released in 2002, PlayStation followed much later in 2010.
In 2002 Warcraft 3’s multiplayer was fine. In 2002 Battlefield 1942 was fine; It was a good as Halo’s multiplayer, which somehow ALSO had fine multiplayer at release in 2001 despite the subscription service for multiplayer not until a year after the game had already launched.
Even if I gave you that, the subscription “fee” isn’t what fixed multiplayer design, that was fixed by… Game developers.
It is. The party system, voice chat services, and the ability to join on or invite friends in a universal way regardless of the game without having to make an account for that game all requires expensive infrastructure and manpower to build and maintain.
Xbox GamePass released in 2017 and has nothing to do with multiplayer. The multiplayer service Xbox live released in 2002 and PlayStation followed in 2006. You’re not beating the allegations.
Game developers were uninvolved in the fix for multiplayer design. Game developers are unsurprisingly, only involved in the development of their game. The reliable third party social systems were designed by engineers at Xbox and Sony, and on the PC side at Valve. Multiplayer existed on consoles prior to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, but just like their PC counterpart, it was clunky, unintuitive, and inconsistent between games. The PlayStation network and XBL were created as a direct result of those issues.
Yeah sorry, what is this… Like the third time I’ve stated this? PC did all of the things you’re claiming without an extra subscription fee. Sure, maybe Xbox took some subscription fees and funded infrastructure, that’s not my point. My point is they didn’t need to, as evidenced by someone else who did the exact same thing without the subscription model.
Playstation and Xbox, as a publicly traded hardware and software company, are much more pressured to discover and capture extraneous revenue sources; and the vast majority of the subscription income went to investors. Maybe it’s helpful to point out that Valve doesn’t have public investors, and the vast majority of game development companies also don’t have investors. The simplest solution here is that the subscription fee was created out greed, not necessity.
It did not do all those things. Not until very recently, and only through Steam. You can say it as many times as you want, that doesn’t make it true lol.
Sony did it for awhile without the subscription model too. Thats not evidence that they didn’t need to. The cost of infrastructure needed to maintain this model has gone up in the last 25 years with more players, higher expectations, and added complexity contributing to more manpower and higher salary expectations.
A free service doesn’t scale very well when it gets exponentially more expensive to maintain as time goes on. Sony was able to subsidize that service at one point in time but very understandably they can’t do that in the big 26. They already sell the hardware at a loss, if they continued to provide that infrastructure for free, leaving them only with commission on PS store sales, but also we don’t want them to take that big a cut from game developers, and we want them to still provide disk drives so we can buy and share games outside their store, and also we don’t want them to buy studios and make games exclusive to their platform… like corporate greed is one thing but also god forbid we just pay a reasonable price for the things we use.
Valve on the other hand doesn’t have to worry about this because they were never in the hardware game to begin with, and now with the Steam Machine they’ve already confirmed they’re not subsidizing hardware.
Now you’re being a bit unfair by bundling together console hardware and software while keeping PC hardware and software separate.
To be fair you would need to take into account every available piece of software to make the determination if those features were available for PC before, at the same time, or after consoles.
If I had to guess I’d say that in 90% of cases the innovation occured on PC due to it being an open ecosystem with freely available development hardware and higher numbers of developers. Big successful companies generally don’t come up with big new good ideas, they steal them from other products that have already been proven.
But let’s just looks at this differently. In 2004 the Microsoft video game division reported profits of 2.75 billion. The Xbox live service reported 750,000 subscribers each paying $50 a year, or $37,500,000. The absence of Xbox live would have reduced Microsoft game divisions profits from 2.75 billion to 2.71 billion. Basically a rounding error. Microsoft could have easily funded any of the developments absent the subscription just as Playstation did for years later; just as PC does until this day
Taking into account every available piece of software, those features appeared on PC 15 years or so after consoles. And only really achieved similar feature parity with early consoles in 2018, and only if you buy all your games from Steam.
In this case the PC company Valve “stole” them from Xbox and Sony. That doesn’t really help your argument at all here, on the contrary it just goes to show how much easier valve has had it as all they’ve had to do is follow a blueprint, keeping their costs lower which uniquely helps them subsidize them.
In 2004 the Xbox division of Microsoft reported $0 in profits. Xbox division became profitable for the first time in 2008. Know what was the driving force behind that sustained profitability?
Do I really need to tell you the answer or do you think you can guess?
Okay. Pick a gaming feature that you believe was created by console manufacturers from 2002-present.
Xbox Live, the very thing we’re talking about, was the original unified party system. Prior to it, there were third party voice chat systems and third party lobby systems, but these were disparate systems you had to maintain separate identities for. Difference games supported different lobby systems so you couldn’t even have just one of each either. Xbox was the first to tie these things together under one “Gamertag” as one persistent presence and identity you could use to coordinate all your friends together in to chat, join in games through, collect persistent achievements, etc.
Many years later we now have that on PC via Steam, but even then that doesn’t cover all games on the platform since there are games locked to Epic, Uplay, or indie games sold direct through a website.
It seems you’re saying is that Microsoft created this amazing playground, and then sold solutions to the problems they created when they fenced it off, and then passed that off as innovation with a subscription fee?
The party system, the group screens, the voice chat, these were all created to make up for the short comings of consoles. Our players can’t install ventrilo on Xbox. They can’t quickly type a message on a keyboard and hit enter, so let’s create a solution for the problems that we created when we made this a locked ecosystem.
So I don’t know… You’re saying everything that Xbox did was doable before on PC, but required multiple accounts and apps; but then Xbox needs lots of money to copy those features into their product? Don’t know if I buy it, and I certainly don’t 20+ years and billions of dollars buy it.
You’ve said a few times now that steam took 15 years to add these feature and it seems obvious to me why. We already had that shit. Sure it’s convenient on console, but it’s not subscription worthy.
Think of any other system that incorporated already existing features together to form a more convenient enjoyable experience and you’ll see that there isn’t a subscription fee.
Public malls, smart phones (still replaces multiple products without a data plan), Gas station/convenience stores, Google has been consolidated products together and building infrastructure for decades; and no subscription fee, and I guarantee you Googles infrastructure is light-years beyond Xbox, Xbox probably runs a lot of shit through Google.