Years ago I had been out of multiplayer gaming for a number of years and had really only had experiences with PC games, where multiplayer is/was just this standard thing. You already bought the game, playing multiplayer with other people is just a thing you can hop on and do whenever you want for free (provided there’s other people to play). I owned consoles, but never played multiplayer games on them, so never dealt with game passes or anything like that.
When my oldest son started getting into gaming, we wanted to play couch co-op on an Xbox game, but then ran into a problem with it requiring an Xbox game pass for a co-op mode (it had been couch co-op in previous games from the series; basically a horde mode where you go against bots, so no reason to go online). Requiring a game pass for that just seemed like a shit way to get more subscriptions.
When I complained about it on Reddit, people swarmed to tell me what a jackass I was and that of course you have to subscribe to play with game pass, like what kind of world was I living in where I expected free multiplayer gaming? Apparently I hadn’t realized what a golden age I had lived in when something like free multiplayer gaming was just a standard thing.
That’s been my experience as well, the dogpiling crap. I even had someone argue “How are businesses supposed to stay alive if they don’t charge monthly!” – and they couldn’t agree that the business could create new IP, or create new games, instead of sitting on the same game for 10+ years.
Apparently I hadn’t realized what a golden age I had lived in when something like free multiplayer gaming was just a standard thing
This was literally never a thing on consoles, so maybe that’s the issue?
Multiplayer gaming was and generally still is totally free on PC, but consoles don’t have the infrastructure to pull from and have charged since they launched the feature.
The issue there is that the game co-op always goes through their servers.
Games that don’t run their multiplayer that way don’t have this issue, but as multiplayer continues to transition to remote play rather than couch co-op it will likely continue to spread.
Years ago I had been out of multiplayer gaming for a number of years and had really only had experiences with PC games, where multiplayer is/was just this standard thing. You already bought the game, playing multiplayer with other people is just a thing you can hop on and do whenever you want for free (provided there’s other people to play). I owned consoles, but never played multiplayer games on them, so never dealt with game passes or anything like that.
When my oldest son started getting into gaming, we wanted to play couch co-op on an Xbox game, but then ran into a problem with it requiring an Xbox game pass for a co-op mode (it had been couch co-op in previous games from the series; basically a horde mode where you go against bots, so no reason to go online). Requiring a game pass for that just seemed like a shit way to get more subscriptions.
When I complained about it on Reddit, people swarmed to tell me what a jackass I was and that of course you have to subscribe to play with game pass, like what kind of world was I living in where I expected free multiplayer gaming? Apparently I hadn’t realized what a golden age I had lived in when something like free multiplayer gaming was just a standard thing.
That’s been my experience as well, the dogpiling crap. I even had someone argue “How are businesses supposed to stay alive if they don’t charge monthly!” – and they couldn’t agree that the business could create new IP, or create new games, instead of sitting on the same game for 10+ years.
This was literally never a thing on consoles, so maybe that’s the issue?
Multiplayer gaming was and generally still is totally free on PC, but consoles don’t have the infrastructure to pull from and have charged since they launched the feature.
For couch co-op?
The issue there is that the game co-op always goes through their servers.
Games that don’t run their multiplayer that way don’t have this issue, but as multiplayer continues to transition to remote play rather than couch co-op it will likely continue to spread.
You said that (free co-op) was literally never a thing on consoles. It has been a thing since Pong.
I assumed that someone reading this conversation would apply context and thus understand what I was talking about.