I bought an Xbox for live.
Though I did work for Microsoft and launch the service. 2 million subs brings a wee tear to my eye...
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I bought an Xbox for live.
Though I did work for Microsoft and launch the service. 2 million subs brings a wee tear to my eye...
0->2 million is pretty damn good. Remember, back in 2002, there was no online gaming for consoles. It was a brand new thing.*
Now its accepted and, in fact, demanded in console games. Project Gotham 2 did amazing stuff with single-player/multi-player convergence that not even PC games have tried. To be real, the interfaces used in PC online games have evolved a LOT in the past few years, Im sure Live's amazing interface has a lot to do with it.
As for World of Warcraft getting to 3.5 million in 9 months... its just a freak show. Unbelievable, unheard of. EverQuest used to be the big boy in the MMO world, with 400,000 subscribers.
*yes, I know there was Xband, Netlink, SegaNet. But all those were pitiful, stupid failures and are worthless.
That's a wonderful bit of revisionist history you've got there, diff.
SegaNet was shit. Horrible. Worst online gaming service ever. And I used both MPlayer and TEN. There was fucking lag in Chu Chu Rocket. CHU CHU ROCKET. Worse than Netlink, which Sega had at least the good sense to not make a linchpin of the Saturn strategy.
As for Xband, well there's a reason why nobody bothered with online for so long after it died. It was shit. Yea, Im sure a few of the dorks on here will make posts now talking about how much fun they had with it, but really - there was what, 100 people using the service? It was horse shit.
The fact is, all of these online gaming attempts were failures. Xbox Live has come along, established a market, established a bare minimum of what we should expect in online gaming, established a great interface, and showed what type of experiences are possible. Its really moved console online forward, now we just need more game designs like PGR2 and Splinter Cell to match it.
For as bad as Chu Chu Rocket was (bad netcode), Phantasy Star Online over Broadband was fantastic. FANTASTIC. Hell, it was pretty good over Dialup.
Yea, with the what, 6 broadband adapters Sega actually released to stores?
So you manage to track one down, and you get to play a game less interesting, less varied, and less fun than the first Diablo.
Wow, go Sega.
I'm just saying the netcode was solid. I'm certainly not comparing it to Diablo.
I used dialup and it worked pretty damn well, I certainly had no complaints about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Master
diff is right, no online service has made an impact on the gaming industry till Live. Notice how no one talks about PS2 online? Cuz it's not worth talking about...
Diff is right, and this is speaking as someone who's played on xband (it sucked), bba for dreamcast (not enough games), xbox is the first one to do console online right, PSP might be the second, but I wouldn't bet on it.