LIVE now free for PC gamers

Nick over at Shacknews has an in depth interview with Microsoft regarding this news.

Looks like MS does have plans to distribute games digitally and they know they've got some work to do.

The interview: http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=946

I'm going to start a Steam vs. LIVE article and post back later.

It's pretty ballsy of MS to drop the fee for PC users. I'm sure a few 360 owners will cry out over how unfair it is.

The unfairness started with MS started charging $50 a year for services that were already offered for free...for hand-me-down games from the console (Halo 2 and Gears of War).

But you are right. Someone's going to start crying "no fair". They should be crying "no fair" because SONY and Nintendo don't charge for access to their gaming networks...hrmm...kind of like how the PC networks are free.

This is a good move for MS to expand GFWL.

Re: pricing
Fair comes to town once a year. As long as I think what I'm getting from XBL is worth what I pay for it, I'll continue to buy it, and I'm currently happy. Don't think it's worth it, don't pay it. Easy.

A spin on Midnight's blog's title: Not paying is absolutely free.

...which is why of all the PC gamers I know, none of them bought a $50 a year subscription to Xbox LIVE. It wasn't a fair value for the service.

Yeah, those PC gamers are so ahead of the curve... we console users are just chumps, might as well quit now.

$5 a month isn't that much at all. WoW players are paying three times that to play one game, plus the $20 (used to be $50) for the starter kit. To me that is bad deal. Xbox Live gives me the ability to do a lot more than play one game online for far less.
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"Don't blow this, Gene!"

Why are you going there again?

It’s a bad deal because you don’t like WoW enough. If you liked WoW more, you'd pay $15 a month. You like LIVE enough to pay $50 a year. And you’ve probably spent enough on Xbox LIVE to be the equivalent of two years of gaming in WoW.

If you are claiming that you’ve got more ability on LIVE than on the PC, then you must not use your PC much. Else, you are comparing one game (WoW) which has more paying subscribers than the entire Xbox LIVE network to that very LIVE network.

I’m having a hard time thinking of features available on Xbox LIVE that aren’t available on the PC. But I can start rattling off a lot of features available on the PC that aren’t on LIVE and won’t ever be on LIVE.

The big thing that LIVE has that the PC doesn't? Halo 3. CoD4, TF2, Bioshock, Portal, etc. are all on the PC with no network fee access.

You are right that $5/month isn't that much to us.

It's almost so inexpensive that it doesn't really matter what you get in return. Heck. I’ve given $50 subscriptions to LIVE away as gifts several times. And back during the first generation of Xbox LIVE all you had was basic matchmaking and a friend's list. No achievements, profiles, data sharing etc. People were OK with paying $50 back then (although there were fewer subscribers back then). You get a lot more now with your LIVE subscription that you did back then so it seems like an even better deal now.

You have to admit though that there's a price point at which you wouldn't pay money for Xbox LIVE. I don't know many people that think it's an absolute steal of a deal right now.

At that price point you would say LIVE costs too much and isn't worth the investment. What is the price point? It'll be different for different people. To some it could be $100 a year. I guess some fanatics would pay $15 a month to be able to play Halo 3 with their online community just like WoW and EVE players pay a monthly subscription to be immersed in their virtual worlds.

But don't act like PC gaming is worse for charging for online access for certain games (which are almost always in the RPG genre). First off, you've spent $10 several times just to be able to download 2 or 3 maps and play in certain online playlists; features that are almost always free on PC titles. Heck, figuring in 6 years of XBL, all the maps and MS points I've bought. I've probably spent near $500 on Xbox LIVE. That’s more than 3 years of WoW.

Is $500 a good value for the stuff I got on LIVE? I guess. I mean, I want to play on new Halo maps. Even though it costs $10 for the maps, I want to play them more than I want my $10. I also want to play with THX’ers. Few THX’ers are on Steam or Xfire regularly.

Secondly, games like EVE and WoW need to have online subscriptions. I mean, what does your $50 a month to Microsoft really do? You don't know. In the meantime, Halo 2 is full of cheaters. You rarely find a non-laggy game of Big Team Battle. You don’t see the results of the player feedback mechanism working. And there’s probably a 50% chance you are going to run into racist and sexual language sometime during your gaming session.

What does your Bungie Pro subscription do? Get you some more storage space. Really? In this day and age, storage space is so precious that you've got to pass the cost on to the user? (Thank you Google for giving me 7 GB of Gmail storage space).

In the case of EVE and WoW, subscriptions are needed to sustain the persistent realms. In Halo 3 or CoD4 on the console, your gaming session pretty much ends the existence of whatever virtual space you just entered. It doesn't continue on; even in the RPS and RTS games that you play on the console. Your virtual world pretty much dissipates once you end your gaming session.

In EVE and WoW, the realms live on for as long as there is a significant user base. Blizzard governs those realms to ensure their successful life (does WoW still have more paying subscribers than Xbox LIVE? I wonder about those stats.) They regulate certain actions and continue to create experiences for the game that guarantee that the virtual world thrives. Their subscriptions go right to Blizzard who in turn invested that money back into the WoW game and future Blizzard titles. Blizzard has employees being paid by the users to make their gaming experience better. It would be terribly hard to sustain these virtual realms for years at a time for millions of gamers without a subscription model.

And finally about pricing, you aren’t paying $50 a year for unlimited Xbox LIVE access in your gaming environment. You are paying $50 a year for one gamertag to access the Gold features on LIVE. Want another gamertag? Have 2 or more people in your household that wants to play on LIVE? The $50 price tag becomes more of a factor when you look at wanting/needing more users online.

And one more thing about WoW. If WoW ever came to the console (I don’t know of anyone that plays WoW with a controller), then you can bet that Blizzard would charge LIVE users a fee to play that game each month (mostly for the reasons I mentioned in the paragraph above). WoW would probably be one of the most popular games on LIVE even with an extra monthly fee. I know I would pay an added fee to play Halo 3 or other certain games on LIVE. Right now you’ve got to pay money to play in certain playlists and matchmakings.

At the end of the day, the fee certainly isn’t preventing WoW from being popular. I reckon it’s the most popular 3D multiplayer game on the market. And $50 a year for LIVE isn’t hurting the subscribers that already have it. The LIVE subscriber base continues to grow.

But you’ve got to wonder how much more popular LIVE would be if it was entirely free. Maybe in the future you’ll see that day. The PS3 is set to have a larger install base than the XBOX 360. The PSN is free. If more developers would make games for the Wii, you may see a Wii network with more users than LIVE.

Perhaps then Microsoft would charge $0 for all online gameplay features. The $50 a year would be for access to online media.

What I want from my $50 a month is near unlimited access to TV shows, videos, and music. Throw some ads on my dashboard. Serve me ads tailored to my purchasing tendencies. But let me play online video games for free.

I’m already paying for LIVE access. Why do I have to pay a few bucks to watch a TV show that I can stream for free from a PC? Where is my money going?

To me, it’s going straight to access. I’m paying for access to online gameplay for console games I buy. Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet and our $50 a year subscription is subsidizing their Entertainment Division...all the while they are losing money on XBOX? Come on.

People like to consume and spend money. $50 a year isn’t a big deal to a lot of people. But the precedent was set back in the 80's and 90's with online gaming. Those aware of that are cautious to pay $50 a year for access to online gaming. That’s all. Where first person shooters started is where online gaming was/is free.

In the end, gamers like to game and they'll pay money to game. This is why the price of gaming consoles continue to go up. Either on the console or PC, gamers will pay for access and privilege. LIVE is declared a success by Microsoft and they are adding features and the $50 a year membership fee is seemingly buying more than it used to.

But what it is really buying is exposure to a Marketplace where you can yet again spend more money.

Free is a pretty easy choice.

All I am saying is that some people are paying three times what I am paying to play one stinkin' game. $5 isn't bad, free would be better, but until I am paying $15 a month, I ain't complaining.

I'm not going anywhere... I'm just, once again, pointing out the seemingly elitist attitude toward console gamers that seems to rear its head quite often. PC gamers may be more hardcore and cutting edge, but I don't like the insinuation that those of us that aren't heavy PC gamers are, by default, inferior. And we are such chumps, we are willing to pay, gasp, a small fee, for a service that is free on PC.

I think we are all well aware, perhaps more than we ever wanted to be, of the advantages PC gaming over consoles. We don't need to have it flaunted in our face at every opportunity. Although it may not be intended, IMO, this comes off as snobby elitism. I could be the only one, and I am sure it is unintentional, but it frosts my cake.
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"Don't blow this, Gene!"

The way I look at it, $15 a month in wow gets you a lot more than xbox live gives. It cost a ton of money for blizzard to host all those servers for wow , I think they have like ~60-70 now. I have played wow for a long time off and on, finally quiting a while ago. $180 dollars for a year vs $50 for xbox live. I'll break down my view point.

You get more bang for your buck with wow than xbox live. In wow you get lag free, 95% active servers, cheat free, constant upgrades to content in the game for "FREE". They add new content monthly it seems now with constant patches to improve gameplay. Downside, paying a monthly fee, which are the time I felt wasn't a big deal. After I quit, I sold my account and basically got back all the money I paid to play the game from monthly fees over 1.5year span with taking long breaks every now and then. One thing for sure is, I will never play another MMORPG, they take waaaaaay to much time and are highly highly addictive.

Xbox Live gives you internet access that you already pay for. They provide multiple games that support online play, which as EA pointed out is free on the PC(Minus the mmo's due to the cost of running servers and updating teams). You get cheaters, laggy gameplay most of the time, slow updates like two a year? I haven't been on xbox live in a while... then you get upgrade content via downloadable goodies, which comes with a price tag?!?! WTF

For $50 bucks I should be able to use that money via downloading new maps or whatever else I wish to download.

The main reason I play PC games online over Xbox Live is for the user content and free access. Take a look at Team Fortress 2 on PC and Xbox. I'm sure the players are much greater on the Xbox, why is this... not because the game isn't good, but its content. It was shipped with 6 maps I think, I don't have a copy of Orange Box on the 360, but I know it didn't ship with them all. On the PC, TF has oodles of maps, user created maps, free downloadable maps and weapons(You think xbox would do this? Hell no). Plus the bonus of Modifications to the game, to add new fresh gameplay experience. Go check out the original counterstrike, they have tons of mods from super hero powerup games, RTS worldcraft 3 mod(awesome one), they have a mod that acts like the new game coming out, Left 4 Dead. The ability to enjoy rich gameplay is not limited, vs xbox where you can't do jack. I'm 100% sure if Halo 3 was out for the PC, they would get all the maps for free minus xbox live users that have to dish out another $40 bucks to buy all the stupid maps, it's just retard!

If xbox live wants to do be a true online experience, they need to
A) Drop the price tag to get online
B) Make downloadable content free if charging monthly/yearly fees
C) Allow user content to be created and uploaded for more unique playing

Don't get me wrong that I hate xbox live, I would love to get back in the loop with xbox online gaming with THX. I'm currently not playing on it due to crappy internet, but I would if I could.

On top of that, I feel that both experiences are unique. I enjoy PC online gaming with my keyboard/mouse. I also really enjoy laying on the sofa with controller in my hand, relaxing and gaming. They both bring great quality gaming to the table, I just feel if they made them both accessible to everyone.. you would see more online pc gamers on the consoles which is good!

I still mind blowing that they don't have a keyboard/mouse setup yet. The online community would benefit greatly from a keyboard, just from viewing the marketplace/text messaging friends.

Reading EA/Celery's viewpoints make me angry that I'm paying for some of the things I'm paying for. I WOULD like access to more free content for the price of XBL. I AM mad that the music videos cost money to watch. I DO think it's stupid that you're only paying for ONE XBL account as opposed to one 360.

But then I remember it's <$5 per month and I don't really care again.

btw, Celery, you can use a USB keyboard to browse marketplace and txt friends.

I would love for XBL to be free as much as anyone. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable that MS charge a monthly subscription for XBL for the following reasons:

1. They take a loss on the hardware and the Entertainment and Devices Division is consistently unprofitable. The company as a whole has to be profitable else at some point in the future we won't be gaming on Xboxen anymore. Revenue from XBL is as reasonable a place as any to recoup some of the difference.

2. Part of the demographic they're targeting doesn't want to game on a PC for free. Either they don't own the hardware, have parental/content concerns, or they just aren't interested. While a closed system like XBL seems limiting to us, it is not only adequate but desirable for many.

3. Price reflects quality, and creates a legitimate claim on customer service. I have only used PSN once and Wii's online interface never, but everything I read says they're both crap. A company is going to be less inclined to invest in something it's giving away for free. If a company fails to provide services you have paid for, they are legally liable, so they're going to provide at least some level of customer service.

4. Would the PR they gain among tech enthusiasts and revenue generated with ads (that would presumably replace the subscription structure) be worth the $50 million annually they currently get from Gold subscribers? I don't really know. Advertising is huge, but I'm skeptical that $50 million might be too large to overcome.

5. You don't get consistent, long-term, high-quality, deadline-meeting work out of people for free. I don't work for free and I don't expect XBL personnel to work for free either.

Once again, I'd love to save my $100/year for two gamertags, but it's not going to happen, and I'm not extremely upset about it because I don't feel like I'm getting the shaft. That perception will be different for everyone.

For some reason, I've had my live subscription for two years now and been online a halfdozen times when I take my 360 over to my brothers or bham to visit the female. That's wasting money...

I can understand the viewpoints from both sides of the table. EA, Celery, and Midnight have made some excellent points. I guess it boils down to each person's individual wants. Personally, I think it's a fair price. Obviously, if I didn't, you guys wouldn't see my gamertag signed into XBL.

Like everyone else has already said, Live for PC gamers has taken a step in the right direction. It would make for an interesting comparison to the 360 XBL, however, if both had an equal # of subscribers. That way we could see if the free service kept up with (or surpassed?!) the paid service. I doubt that day will come, b/c as has already been indicated, 360 XBL appeals to a slightly different demographic than Games for Windows LIVE.

Once GfW-LIVE has a desktop client there will be tens of millions of LIVE users on the PC (if not well over 100,000,000). There will be no comparison to the XBOX install base. There are about 20M consoles sold and about 12M users on LIVE (not all paying, not all unique).

LIVE's biggest game has 1M unique users using it a day (H3). After you get past H2, CoD4, and GoW, I think there are very few people playing on XBOX LIVE. Some very unpopular games have been in the Top 10 Most Played on Live list.

So, I think whatever MS is earning from selling Gold Subscriptions is a drop in the bucket to what is possible.

You guys realize that you're really taking about a Tiered Internet? One where you pay $65 a month for your high speed internet, and then you pay more money just to access more websites (like pay $20 a month for Google.com, Yahoo.com, Microsoft.com, and Wikipedia.com, pay $40 a month for YouTube.com, facebook.com, Myspace.com, etc.). Only it's worse in the case of XBOX Live. You are paying $50 a year per person for access to LIVE.

The Tiered Internet is in the works as a part of the Net Neutrality effort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

Pretty cool. Microsoft is going to refund the $50 to LIVE users that bought the PC service. I've used GfW-LIVE since it was in beta, but I didn't buy LIVE only for the PC. I doubt I'll see a refund.

I think we are all agreeing that $50 isn't a rip off for us. But I wish my money went to something that improved my experience. Multiplayer gaming on LIVE is a low quality experience. If I'm paying for the service, I'd like to have a lag-free, griefer-free experience.

Forgot my last point...

Microsoft is most likely making GfW-LIVE free to compete with Steam. Going back to something I said a couple of posts ago, Microsoft may be forced to do the same for the XBOX if SONY and Nintendo continue to outsell the XBOX. Their networks will be larger and free.

Refunds for Xbox LIVE baby!

I don't think the tiered internet comparison is applicable just because XBL is delivered via ethernet. Netflix Watch-Now, VOIP, and XBL are all examples of services delivered via ethernet that have unique hardware, software, and personnel requirements (on the provider's end) to function. It's certainly not reasonable to ask the company to absorb those costs without any revenue, and I'm skeptical that they could survive on embedded advertising alone.

At the end of the day people have to get paid. XBL has a lot of people and equipment to pay for. Google has been incredibly successful with advertising, but everybody can't pull that off. Perhaps I underestimate advertising revenue, but I just don't think it's feasible.

If XBL does become free at some point then we'll still be paying those costs somewhere. MS may make it up on Vista/Windows 7, tack it onto the Xbox hardware, or some other scheme, but they will recoup those costs.

XBL and its overall cost structure; monthly payments, Microsoft points, value-added worthless items, etc are all more a symptom of a closed platform and lack of competition. What you have today is a console market analogous to the closed AOL environment of the 90s.

I don’t see this changing either. XBL will stay the way it is. As long as, the PSN and Wii networks continue to suck; the console makers continue to sell consoles at a lost, which makes it pointless to open up their platforms.

Microsoft like always though, seems to have conflicting strategies. Obvious from their new dashboard update, Microsoft is trying to pull in “casual gamers”, but what “casual gamer” is going to pay for XBL?

It seems to me that the XBOX 360 is an internet appliance and viewer that enables access to non-real-time media content much like a web browser allows you access to information and entertainment.

Apple's got lots of hardware invested in iTunes. Apple could charge a yearly fee for iTunes. Millions of people would pay it. But why?

Apple makes their money on hardware and by taking their share of money from the selling of media.

Microsoft is taking a loss on the hardware? Why is that our problem? Why should we help Microsoft get out of the red because they've engineering a machine that costs less than it's worth?

The problem is with Microsoft's business model.

Regardless of all that, Steam is free. It's more popular than XBL. I don't see any added cost passed on to me. In fact, games on Steam are often cheaper than in a store. The multiplayer networking experience is much more satisfying on the computer. I don't buy the argument that a subscription model is justified. And I don't see how my money is making LIVE better for multiplayer gaming.

Instead, we are seeing more monetizing of games through paying for extra storage on XBOX Live, paying for avatars, paying for new maps, and all the mainstream media content (TV, movies, music, etc.). I feel that Gold subscribers on LIVE are justifying this monetization by paying more and more money to Microsoft. I think LIVE gamers are eventually going to price themselves out of the market.

And I think MS is charging $50 a month because they can, not because they need us to help pay for their LIVE service.

Both of you have good points that XBL charges for features that other services seemingly offer for free. I agree, the XBL experience could be better. However, every one of us in this thread gives MS $50/year for XBL. That's the clearest and fairest definition of "worth it" I know, and in that respect we've all agreed.

I was going to add to the discussion but by the time I read all the comments my small brain hurt so much I think I'm just going to relax a bit.

Counter-Strike, Other Valve Games Could Hit XBLA; Studio Hints at Paid TF2 DLC on 360!

"When asked about a possible console release of the Team Fortress 2 add-ons that PC gamers have been receiving for free, such as new maps and weapons, Lombardi stated that the company was still discussing the specifics of pricing."

"We're accumulating a lot of TF2 content for PC and at some point there'll be a sweet amount of stuff that's ready to go and large enough that if people have to pay for it [on consoles], they'll be happy," he noted. Earlier in the year, Lombardi told Shacknews that the content was likely to hit Xbox 360"

Man I hate it when I'm right...