Gunrigger

And this is why it was successful and still exists to this day.

excuse the fist shaking at the cloud

Kids these days literally want everything for free and don’t care that microtransactions and other monetization has pervaded every aspect of games.

Horse armour, man. Never forget the horse armour. Kids these days love horse armour.

Because Steam wants your business. They offer their services in exchange for you buying more games on their platform. Initially they made these services for their own in-house developed games on the platform.

I don’t think they were similar at all. I loved the Dreamcast, but being able to play laggy games of Chu Chu Rocket on dial-up is not really a comparison to the dedicated servers, closed moderated ecosystem with chat/friends etc. that MS created. And that’s just comparing to the early iterations of Xbox Live.

I feel like that was a great scheme to both lock a bunch if people into years of gamepass really early on and bump up their numbers, at the same time as rewarding the loyal Xbox Live subscribers who got a great deal out of it. Win - win.

Arma, counter strike, valheim, v rising, insurgency, satisfactory, battlebit. There’s all sorts of multiplayer PC games that support server hosting.

It was mostly a tongue in cheek comment. But hey because there’s all these other not quite as successful paid services and no-one you know uses them, therefore they are less valuable, we shouldn’t be mad about those ones right?

Would you rather have an unstable dedicated server running on someone’s home PC, or a stable paid for server that is up 24/7? It’s always been possible to run your own dedicated servers, but 3rd party hosting has always been there too, for good reason.

I’m not sure what Xbox Live has to do with pre-ordering. These days if you have Game Pass you’re technically supporting a whole host of indies.

It’s funny to me that you put it this way. Just because in the UK it is historically a punishment for traitors to be quartered.

I was going to say because it would be fucking weird if we just had one big nose hole. Now I’m thinking about it, our nostrils are already pretty weird.

I’m now looking in the mirror at my nostrils and pumping them to the beat of a song.