enjoyinggaming - Why Xbox Live Isn't Free

Why Xbox Live Isn't Free

Until recently, Microsoft could brag about how Live was by far the most feature-complete online service on any platform, with a unified Friends list, the best online shop, voice and video chat as standard and a consistent and stable online experience. But in recent months there’s been a shift in the market, and even bigger changes are coming. Microsoft is the only player to charge for online play, and their policy has landed some of the best online games on the 360... but as PC and PlayStation developers offer comparable features at no extra cost, the Gold subscription starts to lose its shine. The launch of the PC’s Steam Community late last year and promises made by Sony at January’s Consumer Electronics Show have placed Microsoft on the back foot, and has all of us asking: what does your annual subscription pay for?

The Punters

It’s very simple math - you take the features offered by Xbox Live, subtract the features offered by Live Silver, and then subtract the features Microsoft’s nearest competitor - the Playstation Network - offers for free, and whatever’s left is what Gold users get for their annual fee.

Xbox Live 4000-point card $40, 1600-Point card $16

That's the lowest total price we've seen.

In Microsoft’s own words, the perks of being a Gold subscriber are as follows:

1) Play your Xbox 360 multiplayer games online with the premiere online gaming service.
2) Use the brand new TrueSkill Matchmaking system to play against opponents with similar skills, personalities, and gaming tastes.
3) Give player feedback to rate your teammates and opponents on their sportsmanship, abilities, and conduct to influence matchmaking.
4) Play select original Xbox games online (the Xbox 360 Hard Drive is required).
5) Get access to exclusive Gold Member content.
6) Engage in video chat.
7) Enjoy all the Xbox Live Silver features.

Freed from PR-speak, points one, two and three are essentially standard functions of modern online play: multiplayer gaming, online ranking and feedback systems, so we’ll consider them one point. Point four is available to Silver members and even to people without a broadband connection by downloading the CD from xbox.com. Five presumably refers to the demos which are available earlier for Gold subscribers, but that’s really more a way of gimping Silver types than rewarding Gold subscribers. Point six, we can’t argue with - video chat is limited to Gold - but as point seven demonstrates, Live Marketplace, Arcade games, DLC and auto-updates are available at no cost to Silver members.

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We’ll kindly add to Microsoft’s list an eighth and ninth point - mass messaging is only available to Gold users, and Microsoft should be a little more proud of their unified Friends list and messenger which makes online gaming with friends such a complete pleasure.

So, with our non-scientific method, we’ve stripped Microsoft’s nine points down to just four:

1) Online play with standard features offered elsewhere.
2) Video chat.
3) Mass messaging.
4) Unified Friends list and messenger.

And of those four, Sony’s PSN offers one, two and three for no charge to players. In effect, your subscription pays for... er, nothing more than a list of 100 names you can pull up in any game.

Still, what you don’t see is that, unlike PSN, Live’s hosting - leaderboards, Matchmaking, the lot - are all run by Microsoft rather than by third parties. It means devs are more keen to go online on Xbox where the online play is paid for by you, rather than them, so - in that sense, at least - Live’s hosting model makes for a more cohesive and better supported service, but a model where the cost will always be picked up on the gamer’s end.

The Competition

PC gaming has been free or ad-supported for a long time. EA runs Battlefield servers quite happily without a charge, and services like GameSpy handle matchmaking for hundreds of games with ad support and an optional subscription charge.

Most recently, the online Steam store launched back in 2003 as a means to deliver Valve’s games to their customers; it has grown and filled its virtual shelves with stock from the likes of Rockstar, Sega and Capcom, and in September last year, spawned the Steam Community.

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With 15 million users, it dwarfs Xbox Live, and with a unified Friends list, superior online store, and chat and community functions all offered at no cost to gamers, it makes a mockery of Microsoft’s Live service on both PC and 360. Just as Steam is free to gamers, so Steamworks - a set of free tools allowing developers to incorporate anti-piracy, auto-updating and community functions into their games at no cost - is free to developers. The PC already has matchmaking services like GameSpy, but Steamworks is Valve’s move to standardise features across the PC gaming space and has the potential to unify PC gamers through the Steam platform at no charge to developer or gamer.

PlayStation 3

While a dedicated CoD4 player will spend hard-earned money every year for his games on Live, a similarly dedicated player on the PlayStation Network will pay nothing for a service of comparable quality. We can argue over which platform has the better games line-up until we’re all very old and dead, but it’s impossible to dispute who gets the cheaper deal when it comes to playing the same games online. And though Live currently trumps the PSN with its unified Friends list which allows players to connect and chat to Friends in different games, the PlayStation 3 will be updated to include its own cross-game unified Friends list before the end of 2008. Sony’s announcement at January’s CES threatens to place the PlayStation Network on a par with Live, all at no cost to the end user. Like Live, players will be able to send messages and chat with Friends in other games, though thanks to PSN’s more open structure, some third party developers may still insist upon using their own system.

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Konami’s recent Metal Gear Online Beta debacle demonstrates why Live’s unified system is better for gamers, but a few months down the line MGO has proved to be mostly stable and entirely free, while Gears of War 2 still costs 360 owners their pocket money for their nightly games.

Wii

The Nintendo Wii lags behind, with no unified Friends list, no voice chat in most games and only rare online support, but it does have a very rich online shop, and currently offers its online gaming at no charge. Though Nintendo is set to charge for certain games later this year, damn them.

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Still, the two big games, Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros Brawl work quite nicely online without taking a penny from your pocket, and their dashboard offers local news, weather at the click of a button and dedicated channels for daily votes and comparing your Mii avatars. Nintendo’s online service offers some neat tricks, but it remains hampered by their ultra family-friendly policy.

The Developers

So long as the expense of running servers and matchmaking systems has to be picked up by somebody, no online gaming service will ever be truly ‘free’. The cost of PSN and PC online gaming is typically picked up by developers and publishers. CoD4, for example, runs on similar systems on both console platforms, but is maintained by Microsoft on Live and by a dedicated third party company at Activision’s expense on PSN. Both play the same at your end and both work on a peer-to-peer system with a matchmaking layer to link players up, but on Live you pay for that layer, and on PSN they pay.

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Live is a great deal for third parties then, but less so for gamers. On the plus side, it means Microsoft get the lion’s share of online-enabled games, with even the most low-rent of independent developers able to support online matchmaking in their games. Meaning, overall, it makes online play in multi-format titles far more likely on the 360.

But again, is it really $49.99/£39.99’s worth of bonus? The PC/PSN model - where publishers/developers run their own matchmaking systems - has worked for years and PC gamers have enjoyed cost-free gaming even before the days of multiplayer Doom. Sega’s Dreamcast was arguably the first console to make a dent in the online space and managed to offer online play in the majority of its titles at no cost. PlayStation is set to offer users everything Live does at no cost in the near future, Steam offers everything Live does in its supported games, and the Wii... well, at least it’s free, eh?

THE TRUTH

Live’s best asset is that it allows even small developers to support online play - the value of which can’t possibly be denied. Without it, we’d never see online play in small-budget XBLA titles or even marginalised full-price games. The question to ask is whether or not that’s worth the precious money from your pocket, on rotation, every 12 months.

From the player’s end experience, Live is the leader, but it’s hardly a full fifty bucks/forty-quid ahead of its competition. The market has changed since 2002 and so long as the PlayStation Network and Steam Community threaten to match Live feature-for-feature, Live needs to be obviously better in some other way, especially in the UK where it costs a full fifteen quid more for a yearly subscription than the $50 (£25) cost over in the U.S.

At some point in the coming months, PSN will rob Live’s Friends List, completing its mimicry of Microsoft’s system. It’s at that point where questions must start to be asked of Live. It’s certainly easier for developers, but as gamers, perhaps we should rightly expect just a little more from our Gold subscription.