I think it’s called GrainPass

This unlocked some really nostalgic memories of Sony Online Entertainment for me.

Nintendo really did decide to jump on the Xbox Live band- wagon without really implementing any of the perks.

Very true. These things do still exist for a lot of games. It lost popularity a lot on CS due to the incessant need for “competitive” matchmaking, but they are still out there. Rust is a good game for heavily modded servers (if you like the game concept in the first place) and I think Arma (which a bit more niche) is basically all community servers, ranging from in depth military reality to role playing much more mundane stuff.

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.

I don’t agree necessarily with arbitrary maturity lines like drinking at 18/21, but suggesting people might be thought of as adults at 14 is madness. Most kids aren’t finished going through puberty at that age and it’s different for everyone (by like 5-6 years potentially). I think 18 is the “arbitrary” age for most things because 99% of kids have finished puberty at that age and we aren’t in a rush to get those 14-18 year old working in factories.

The whole “capitalism delayed adulthood to 18” arguement doesn’t make sense to me considering very capitalist mills and sweatshops have historically used child labour throughout history.

Also, very important point most people ignore, the human brain doesn’t finish developing until around 25.

I wouldn’t be very happy if my employer decided to send me to war.

What on earth are you talking about?

I can’t think of any invasion anywhere that was caused by LGBT politics, so please cite some sources.

I totally thought of Hypnospace right away withthe link I pulled: http://jgeoff.com/homepage/