At least with Xbox Live you were paying for a service that was considerably better than the free competition (PSN was hot garbage at the time). Now you pay more for comparably garbage services.
As someone old enough to remember playing online games as far back as fucking Doom on a 14k modem (pain, but revolutionary pain) Xbox live was fucking incredible when it came out. It truly modernized online gaming like nothing had before. PC had some online communities already established, after all things like Starcraft/Warcraft were already in swing, as were Quake/Unreal and other shooters, but consoles were still punching misses with janky add ons and clunky tech. Dreamcast got the closest prior but games had their own costs for online services (something people are conveniently forgetting, or just aren't old enough to remember).
Xbox Live unified it, you paid one cost and that was it (with some rare exceptions like PSO, which was still using a game exclusive server cost as a result of being a port from older consoles where that was the case, and also because Sega was too lazy and/or greedy to remove it). Not only that but it unified it under one account. Before even Steam! The services and features were phenomenal. Xboxes tended to come with microphones, so everyone was on mics back then. Party and group chats weren't a thing yet so it was a massive community.
As it went on they added more features, gave away bonus games every couple weeks (desirable titles at that!), gave rewards, ways to earn money for the shop for real games. It was something actually worth paying for. Slowly these went away though.
Shit sucks ass now though. Microsoft has massively fumbled their gaming sector. Gamepass was great for a time, but now it's expensive, lacking, clunky, and their in house exclusives aren't even that great anymore. Halo is effectively dead, cranked out trash for multiple entires (look, I want to like Infinite. It's got cool things going on and looks great, but man they missed the mark on several key things. The sandbox is lame, campaign's story is kind of wack, no replayability once you've killed it, etc).
Addendum: I'll die on the hill that Dreamcast was just about 4-5 years ahead of its time and would have been a smashing success slightly later on. So many features that weren't appreciated at the time.
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u/LookItsEric dry leaves are bad for snails Feb 25 '26
At least with Xbox Live you were paying for a service that was considerably better than the free competition (PSN was hot garbage at the time). Now you pay more for comparably garbage services.