Unsurprising given you need ultimate on Xbox to play gamepass games online. Still stupid that in 2023 you need to pay to play online but unfortunately that’s the state of things in console world.
Personally I’m more surprised that most online PC gaming doesn’t cost. As someone who runs cloud infrastructure for a living, servers aren’t cheap. So when it comes to game servers, who is paying for them?
This isn’t a jab at your comment, rather I’m genuinely curious.
I feel like this is a lot less in vogue lately but in the 360 era it was common to have one player designated as the host. I remember the host would have an advantage with the shotgun in Gears of War. Nowadays I think server cost is factored into the development costs of multiplayer games.
Even back when the lobbies were p2p there was still infrastructure on the developer side to handle the matchmaking, stats and progression. I’m sure the load is much less but the multiplayer experience isn’t as good. It would also be pretty demanding for some games that have huge lobbies like battlefield
I would have expected studios to use a 3rd party system back then. GameSpy was huge in that era to cover that functionality.
From my experience, a lot of pc games operate on a microtransaction model of revenue. Love em or hate em, those lootboxes are paying for the servers everyone else gets to access for free
