PSO Goes Pay to Play on Xbox Live

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Phantasy Star Online is slated for an Xbox release and many hoped that they would offer the game without a monthly fee over Xbox Live. That will not be the case according to Xbox.com's official forums. You will still have to pay a monthly fee to play SEGA's online title on top of whatever Live ends up costing. No word on exactly how much yet but $8.95 would probably be a likely number. 

Comments

Ouch. In addition to that at least the Japanese version seems to require a keyboard which means it's not even optimized for voice chat it appears.

Correct me if Im wrong, but wasnt one of the nice things about live was that you wouldnt have to pay like a monthly fee for each game, only one lump sum per year?

I think Microsoft really did want it to work that way, but they realized that developers wouldn't make stuff like MMORPGs for Xbox Live if they made it so you can't charge extra. There's also the concept of "Premium Content" on Xbox Live. For instance, let's say they make some new levels for Splinter Cell... they could choose to charge you for downloading the level. Once you've downloaded (and paid for) it once, you can delete it and re-download it as many times as you'd like at no extra charge. This is actually kind of cool because what we could see in the future is expansion packs for console games, an idea I like very much.

What does remain true though is that you only get one bill, which is nice. You pay Microsoft, and they in turn give that money to the appropriate company for the game you're paying for.

Well I can't say I'm surprised no MMP is going to be free they just cost to much to develop and maintain, sad though I think LIVE should be free if other companies get to charge for content. Way to many companies think they can reach for your wallet every month, the situation has gotten quite out of hand, nobody wants to sell you anything anymore now it's all service BS.

This is the reason I liked the PS2 open network strategy better at inception. However from what I hear and read about live the fee may actually be worth it. Another thing I was thinking is that MS could offer to maintain all of an MMOG's servers, which could reduce monthly costs of these type of games on XBox.

Yeah that's true but I think that would be a dollar or two at most and then they would just make a bunch of noise about how they will have bigger better live teams and other such bs.

-Griffon