How did sony, microsoft and nintendo pay for their servers before?

>>385657242
PS3 and Vita had online passes that you have to redeem and could only use it for one account.

>>385658085
but were they a one time payment?
and before PS3?

online multiplayer isn't that expensive and many pc games with official servers dont have microtransactions, ads or subscriptions.
Sony just figured out that selling a console for 700$ was a bad idea so they start selling their console with very little profit and make their money with the subscription.
Nintendo just under supply everything so everybody pay at least 40$ for their games.

>>385657242
>Microsoft
Always charged for online services.
>Sony
PS1 had no network services
PS2 same until expansion bay, game servers were hosted by game publishers
PS3/Vita was funded by people who paid for Plus, it was completely free otherwise. Sony could easily lose money on keeping the services up even as they earned money on publisher licenses.

I suspect Nintendo could keep the services up considering Nintendo Wii wasn't sold at a loss.

>>385657242
>my question is how did sony, microsoft and nintendo pay for their servers before they started charging for online?
They're billion dollar companies making loadsa cash on video game sales and licensing fees.

>>385658880
any example you could give?

>>385658930
Nintendo didn't even have their own online service until the Wii U/3DS's Nintendo Network. The Wii and DS-era "Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection" was run by Gamespy, and when they went belly-up, so did online functionality for that generation of Nintendo games.

>>385659221
no company wants to lose money even if is just a small amount from keeping servers up
not even billion dollar companies

>>385659691
My bad. I haven't had a Nintendo console myself and my assumption was wrong.

>>385657242
>How did sony, microsoft and nintendo pay for their servers before?
The normal way of their profit?

>>385659904
that answers the question, you're just backing up with some counter point.

>>385658930
>PS3/Vita was funded by people who paid for Plus
Plus didn't come till 2009, that means for 3 years the servers were free and still you didn't need PS+ to play online so from 2006 until now PS3 is still free

Online passes, significantly smaller userbases.
the xbox division had essentially no support from microsoft in terms of post-launch funding, for revisions and the like, so online servers costing money was their option, since online gameplay was something they did better than sony, and much more easily, all built in.
ps2 had barely any online players for any of their games in the west, so server fees were relatively miniscule.
gamecube had like two games that ever used the network adapter.

So, gen 7 rolls around and xbox basically repeats itself, charging extra for things that were becoming standard elsewhere in the world like wi-fi, while sony and nintendo included it freely. Sony and nintendo mis-anticipated (or just didn't expect, more likely) the massive swelling of the gaming market with the successes of the 360, and wii back to back. It made server costs unrealistic to maintain as free services, and the p2p structure that all the services used, when rolled out to the west, was crumbling. The tiny, almost unused actual servers were dying every other day. So they offloaded stuff like server control back to the devs/publishers and we got online passes because it's another chance to milk the consumer. Now they're disallowed because companies get the guarantee that users will be gated via online subscriptions.

>>385657242
Sony got more jewish overnight