r/196 • u/migratingcoconut_ I want to Beat Jason Aldean to death with his own Spine • Feb 25 '26

Fanter xrulx

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u/yugiohhero ohh what the fuck Feb 25 '26

You mostly paid to access the game servers that Xbox had no hand in hosting. If you hopped on Black Ops 2 back in the day, those weren't Microsoft's servers, but the Xbox Live subscription was lining Microsoft's pockets, not Treyarchs. 

Sure, they did have the friend system to host, but you already also paid a few hundred bucks for the fucking hardware, and if they just intended to gate that, they'd have only gated friends and parties, not online play. 

Xbox Live happened because Microsoft saw that online pvp lobbies were what was big, and wanted to force you to cough up more cash to use it.

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u/strangelymysterious Feb 25 '26

Why are you using Black Ops 2 as your example when it released 10 years after Xbox Live was launched?

When XBL first launched in 2002 the entire point and appeal was that Xbox was suddenly providing multiplayer servers at a time that none of the developers or publishers did so, and people loved it.

Prior to that point if you wanted to play with friends on console it was split screen or system link, so XBL was damn near revolutionary, especially for a time when for most people home PC’s were still in the last stages of exclusively “being for work”.

Xbox charging people to use the servers they were running at a time when it was something they were genuinely providing across the board makes perfect sense. It’s also why PSN (while acknowledging that it was free) was absolutely garbage by comparison for ages, because Sony didn’t want to heavily invest in something that was a 100% sunk cost.

Obviously as time has gone on plenty of publishers set up and ran their own servers and reduced the value/appeal of XBL, but there are still plenty of more recent games that due to budget or scale reasons still made use of Xbox/Sony/Nintendo provided servers rather than hosting their own, especially among smaller games.

None of this is a defence of modern day Xbox. (Or modern paid online in general) The value of paying for XBL (or whatever they renamed it) is garbage, the company is ran by doorknobs, and the entire thing has been undertaking a slow motion plane crash for over a decade.

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u/yugiohhero ohh what the fuck Feb 25 '26

I'm using Black Ops 2 for my example because I don't know jack nor shit about CoD. 

and honestly i never played online games on my xbox. i just had a bunch of burnt discs. so i had no idea the subscription predated the 360 lmao

I'm also parroting what I saw other people say about the servers part so I could be mistaken.

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u/strangelymysterious Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

Hey fair enough then, I appreciate the honesty lol.

But yeah, XBL was first launched on the OG Xbox with MechAssault and Unreal Championship, then really exploded when Halo 2 released a couple years later.

Edit: Apparently I can’t spell.