Gamers Shouldn't Have To Pay For Online Multiplayer

[CosaNostra]

With the recent Lizard Squad DDoS attack on both PSN and Xbox Live leaving many new PS4 and Xbox One adopters unable to access online features during Christmas, console gamers, now more than ever are starting to wonder why on Earth they’re paying for online multiplayer. The logic being, “What the hell? I pay a premium price yet the network is still this vulnerable to DDoS attacks.â€

While I understand your frustration, that sort of mentality shows two things about you, neither of which reflect well on your intelligence. One, you don’t understand what a DDoS attack actually is and two, you’ve bought into the delusion that paying for Xbox Live Gold and PlayStation Plus has actually been securing you a better online experience. Sorry, but you’ve been played.

Let’s briefly discuss DDoS attacks and why they’re difficult to prevent. A distributed denial of service attack is essentially when some people spam a server with fake traffic, overloading the servers and shutting them down, which is what happened on Christmas. Essentially, the servers are overloading the same way some games have multiplayer issues at launch, except the traffic overloading the servers are not real, but generated. Regardless of whether a service is paid or free, there is very little that can be done to prevent a DDoS attack for numerous reasons.

Even if a company chooses to buy additional servers to handle more traffic, groups like Lizard Squad can just spam them with more fake login requests to compensate and developing software to detect fake traffic could very easily fail, potentially blocking online access to real players and even if it was a really good algorithm, hackers would break it. No matter how good a system is, hackers (I use the term very loosely because Lizard Squad aren’t actually hackers) will always find a way to break them, regardless of whether it’s paid or free, which brings me neatly to the main point of this article.

There’s a very good reason why I never purchased an Xbox 360 last generation. Even when I was a teenager, I never liked the idea of having to pay for online multiplayer because I always found it to be completely unfair for a major component of a game to be locked behind a pay-wall. I’m going to be blunt. I like the free games you get access to as a PS Plus or Xbox Live Gold subscriber and at least on the PS4, free to play games don’t require a Plus subscription which is good, but I’m sorry, paying for online multiplayer is fucking bullshit for numerous reasons. However, there is one inherent flaw in both PSN and Xbox Live that proves the point, but we’ll get to that later.

Now on PC, most games are hosted on dedicated servers and have been for decades. Dedicated servers offer the best connections for reasons almost to numerous to explain, mainly that matches are hosted on their own individual servers independently, while eliminating host advantage because they run independently on a server, not through someone’s personal internet. The problem is that dedicated servers cost a fair amount of money since you’re actually buying or renting expensive hardware and many companies are allergic to the word cost, which is where the screwing of the gamer begins to arise.

The much cheaper and ultimately worse alternative is peer-to-peer, which most console games ran on during the previous generation and this generation as well. P-to-P is not desirable because instead of running on individual servers independently, games are hosted through one player’s personal internet, not only meaning the connection is slower from the offset, but that the host will inherently have host advantage and if the host has bad internet, everybody receives lag. It’s definitely not a good system. Now on free services such as the Nintendo Network or PSN on the PS3, this is not a huge grievance because the service is free. Even if PC provides dedicated servers, P-to-P on a free network is fine.

Now if all games on a paid service were hosted on dedicated servers, while not desirable compared to PC where it’s free, it would not be bad. However, that’s not what gamers are receiving with PSN and Xbox Live because despite pre-launch hype, barely any PS4 and Xbox One titles are running on dedicated servers (don’t tell me they are running on dedicated servers. Seriously, try to find a list of current gen games running on dedicated servers) which is where the money subscribers are paying should be invested. You aren’t getting the better online experience and PC gamers are getting better for free, so basically, you are paying for the sake of paying and in return, you receive the privilege of experiencing online multiplayer through P-to-P. Congratulations.

Even with all that in mind, here’s the kicker. What you need to understand is that Sony and Microsoft do not provide servers for 3rd party games. Sony and Microsoft only deal with servers for their own exclusive titles. It’s up to publishers to provide the servers for their games. The network, whether it be PSN or Xbox Live, is simply the platform for which these servers run. It’s the connecting piece. It’s the platform for multiplayer.

Obviously the publisher has to pay for servers. It’s not like Activision can just force Sony to cover the multiplayer costs for Call of Duty when it isn’t their own game. This means server costs for games are paid for by the publisher, not Microsoft or Sony. The publisher pays for the servers using the money they received from game sales, not from your subscription. This means the money you pay for online multiplayer access goes straight to the console manufacturer’s pocket for doing nothing and that’s the aforementioned inherent issue that can never really be resolved.

This whole “I get better connections†spiel has to stop because gamers cannot just get a better connection on P-to-P depending on the network. The money you pay for PS Plus and Xbox Live Gold does not secure you better connections or dedicated servers. It’s merely there because Microsoft proved over the past decade that people will willingly pay for online multiplayer and damage control P-to-P, claiming they have better connections online because they paid money. That’s what Xbox fanboys have been claiming for years.

Honestly, who could blame Sony for jumping on the bandwagon when Microsoft have been profiting from this behavior since the original Xbox? Hell, who can even blame Microsoft for profiting off idiots willing to pay, a lot of money per year I might add, for nothing. You are almost literally paying for nothing and now can you do?

Two of the three consoles require a subscription for online multiplayer, damn near every game has multiplayer and nobody wants to buy a game and have content barred from them because they don’t pay a subscription, so you basically need to have Xbox Live Gold or PS Plus to access major gameplay features. Thanks to thick idiots happily paying for nothing for years, now everybody is getting fucked over for a subscription they should not be forced to own. Online multiplayer is a fundamental component of a game and fundamental game components should always be available to the player for free. You should not have to pay to play online multiplayer.

To conclude, I’ll finish with one final statement addressed to those looking to damage control paying for online multiplayer. Console fanboys, if you believe that gamers need to pay a console manufacturer in order to get the best online experience, how come PC gamers get a better online experience than you for free? No answer? Exactly.