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The cost of said infrastructure is miniscule compared to the immense profits of just selling the games. Also, consoles are generally only sold at a loss at the
by ripdog 6y ago
The cost of said infrastructure is miniscule compared to the immense profits of just selling the games. Also, consoles are generally only sold at a loss at the beginning of their life cycle, becoming profitable not long after launch as component prices fall.
Also, the online services don't provide game servers, these are paid for by the game publishers.
Please don't make excuses for the anti-consumer profiteering of gigantic mega-corporations. No PC platform is 'compelled' to require payment for online play, despite many offering a similar or greater level of server to XBL or PSN.
- Thaxll 6y ago"The cost of said infrastructure is miniscule" This is so wrong, infra is very expensive for online games. It's that expensive that it's still a question to use dedicated server vs p2p because of cost.
- ripdog 6y agoI mean, sure, game dev in general is very expensive. But in the grand scheme of a game's budget, server infra is a very small part relative to the others. In addition, the per-user cost is miniscule (which is probably what I should have said, considering we're discussion companies which charge per-user for 'server infrastructure'). Obviously P2P has many advantages apart from being free for the publisher - such as lower latency.