Be Excellent To Each Other

Emergence? Lovely marketing speak there.

They were going to have to do it, though. Who the hell would want to pay for gaming on the PC?
Mind you, I pay on the 360 without really thinking about it (although I would rather pay and get the better quality servers, TBH).

They couldn't hope to charge for it, really. After spending thousands of pounds on their machines, PC gamers can't afford much else.

To all those excitedly rushing to this thread, that's Windows Live that Grim... means. Not Xbox Live.

Given that 99% of Xbox Live games are run off non-dedicated servers i.e. someone's 360, and given that the PS3 service may stop being a joke someday soon i.e. in-game XMB and (who knows!) some opponents, I find charging for Xbox Live is increasingly galling.

Are the subtitles not working?

Ah. I only ever use the View Active Topics page so never see them.

Except with me, it's 'View new posts'.

So, any PC owners fancy some free cross-platform Shadowrun shenanigans?

Active Topics? Philistine.

But no I agree, once the lolsonylol dies down, the fact is they have a service that is close to Microsofts but £120 cheaper over the life of the console (5 years I guess).

I also hate how Xbox Live makes it an 'all in' or 'all out' question. Casual, occasional online players on Live must be reduced massively by having to pay to do so. Which is galling because more casual players would reduce the amount of fucktards no end.

After defending Sony though, I'm rather worried about the advertising they are planning to include everywhere, but then I suppose I pay for Live and it has ads so sony still wins there too.

I consider XBox Live a bargain. I can't remember how much it costs, but given that I spend 90%+ of my gaming time on Live, I can say it's worth the price of an extra game for a year long sub.

Exactly, it means live is full of mad men who have played CoD4 for about 16 days.

You loon!

Yes, but I just unlocked the triple frags perk!

...for the sixth time

This is a fallacy, because you are comparing "Live that costs money" with "no online gaming", which is a big value gap. The rest of us are discussing "Live that costs money" with "what you get for free on other platforms", which is a gap that is getting narrower as time goes on. In fact I contend as of two weeks ago there is little substansive difference between Live and PSN barring the size of the relative communities.

Barring the one difference that makes all the difference, then?

Not really. I'm looking at it from the POV of someone with a 360. It doesn't really matter to me that PS3 owners get the same service for free, really, as I don't own one and that was a choice I made knowing what the systems do. I've used Live and deem it worthy of 2-3 pounds a month. If they drop it to be free, well that's lovely, and maybe they should, but as an owner of a 360 and not of a PS3, I believe it offers me far more than 30 quid of joy per year.

I keep nearly buying a headset for the PS3, then realise that I never play it online anyway.

Accepted, yes. I still think Live isn't a commercially viable service in and of itself and is only charged for because Microsoft are money grabbers who have pissed away $6bill on Xbox without a profit in sight. See also: the outrageous cost of the Wifi adaptor, refusal to allow third parties to make wireless pads, amazingly expensive hard disks, etc etc.

What exactly are you paying XBL for, anyway? Their match making service? Just give me a server browser in that case...

No, the servers you play on.

Not necessarily. EA, for example, have their own servers.

In related news, I worked out that, over the 2 and one half years I spent playing EvE online, it cost me 400 quid.

But I won't pony up the 40 quid for XBox live at the moment.

For a year.

Something is amiss.

The only thing I can think that is different is that I don't have the time to play games online nowadays that I used to. So I've not subbed to either.

Which is a bit of a shame as I miss EvE a lot, and I would like to do XBox live, but hasn't the times, which is doubly galling as I have shiny telly now.

Buy EvE timecards on eBay, it's loads cheaper.

Also, come play Xbox Live, you grumpy stingy bastard.

I thought they got some money for that?

Except for EA's self-run servers, almost all Live games are done peer-to-peer with no centralised server resource. Certainly the popular titles (Halo 3, CoD4, Guitar Hero, GTA4) are all p2p. Live is largely built around this model. Dunno about the massive shooters, like Battlefield or Frontline; seems like the 50-player maps would benefit from a dedicated server.

Can someone with the Xbox 360 version of UT3 confirm or deny it has dedicated servers? The PS3 one has a couple of dozen "Midway" branded dedicated servers that appear in the server browser.

Yeah, there are dedicated servers... but for all we know they're just 360s set to run as spectators. (the server name is a valid gamertag)