"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn’t share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage against Xbox, but perhaps the split is even worse than that beneath the surface. "
The one-time cost of a game isn’t going to cover the ongoing costs of hosting the servers hosting the game.
You do realise that the game developers/publishers need to host the actual game servers themselves, and they don’t get any piece of the PS+/Xbox Live subscription cake, right?
Yeah sure, the store, friends network, voice chat and what have you do cost money to keep operating, but how does it all work so well on PC then - where it’s free - yet on console they want >50 bucks a year for it? They get 30%+ from game sales, you can’t convince me that paying for online is anywhere close to being required for sustainability of the service.
Also, at least in the X360 times some games wouldn’t have dedicated servers, instead hosting matches on the console of one of the players.
And you would be paying. To host the server on your own machine.