I understand what you are saying but just know that we are in the DLC era. We get half made games and then the other half you pay via DLC (Cough Pokemon Sword and Shield) also add Fighter Z to that. So you'll end up paying like $30 DLC per game.
I have bills and responsibilities as well but that never stopped me from my gaming needs. If paying is an issue they do offer free solutions like unofficial servers. Having the online subscription is good because of the cloud saves if your system die you can recover your files.
Steam offers cloud saves for any game that supports it (which is most games, at least from my experience). For free.
Also, if Nintendo allowed us to make local backups (like the PS and Xbox), we would be able to manually backup our games and save them on our PC / external hard drive, or in a cloud service like Mega.nz or Dropbox. For free.
If you already spent $200+ on console and then games then the money online would be the least if your expenses you can also pay the $4 per month it's just all about budgeting. I can't really say much about online for PC because all the games on my gaming laptop I pirated. But for my PS4/Xbox/ Switch I pay for the online
It's just insignificant IMO the online for switch is dirt cheap compared to my Amazon Prime and Netflix and Apple Music that I pay per month.
Yes, I already paid for the console and games (which range from < 5$ to 60$/70$). I also already paid my ISP to have Internet access.
Why should I have to pay
yet another internet fee to play online on my 200$+ console and whatever priced games that I want to play on it?
I'd understand if the online subscription was there so they could give us DEDICATED servers for each game, but (and correct me if I'm wrong!) that's not the case - pretty much all the games use P2P connections; as in, one player becomes a host and everyone else connects to that player's console. The "only" thing that Nintendo/Sony/MS online servers do is matchmaking. And I believe that the cost for those servers is a lot lower than having dedicated servers.
"Oh but it's just 20 bucks, you're just stingy."
Don't even start with that. That's no excuse when they could easily give us paid online before.
Also, sure,
I'm the stingy one for not wanting to pay "just" 20 bucks even though I already paid 200+ for the console and games, not the multi-million company that is using the exact same online infrastructure since the GameCube days but now decided that it should charge for it because "reasons I guess lmao".
I've always thought that paying for online play is stupid. If they made it like the PS3, where you had the online play for free but you could get the subscription for the extra games and other bonuses it had, I'd have no complaint. After all, everyone would still be able to have fun online, and only the ones that really wanted the bonuses would get the sub.
But companies adding online play to the subscriptions is just a scam (in my opinion) to force people that want to play online to pay even more, even if they don't care at all about all the other bonuses.
I guess just consider it as a luxury if the price is an issue they do have the free stuff. It isn't good but its free
The whole issue is that they
don't provide any free, easy and official alternatives. Let's look at Nintendo specifically:
- Cloud saves: No official free option (like local backups that you can manually transfer to PC) = only option is to pay or, if you want / can, hack your Switch and use homebrew (and if you have an iPatched Switch or a Lite, you have to pay for the SX stuff, so it ends up not free either way).
- Online play: No official free option = same as above
- NES/SNES games: No official free option = emulate on PC / console homebrew / freaking smartphone lmao
- Communication with other people: No official free option (+ the mobile app is pretty meh anyway). THAT SAID, I guess you can look for people online (forums / discord / etc) and interact with them for free that way. The ironic thing is that many times, using Discord and whatnot ends up being better than the official app
Sorry about the wall of text, this whole paid online thing has been crawling under my skin for way too long and I needed to vent it lmao
