>>14077729
>why should i pay 10 dollars a month to play online?
You're not, that's the best thing. Aside from a handfull of mostly Microsoft first party titles - XBL and PSN are fucking peer to peer. To top it off, you get "free" games each month that you need to maintain a subscription to access, and which break the moment you money stop flowing. You also get monthly "deals" for an extra 10% off the digital store on certain titles - which are mostly just publisher sales that Sony/MS tack on an extra 5~10% markup so that they can then take that markup away for subscribers and trick them into thinking their sub is paying for itself. The "PSN/XBL exclusive prices" are just what the games would normally go for on Steam/GOG.
These nutsacks look at all this shit that Sony/MS is "giving them" as part of the "services" and just can't believe how much value is packed into them - never once stopping to consider that XBL/PSN is a fucking gold-mine of record profits and dealing with the cognitive dissonance - let alone realizing that there is no value there at all. It's all just marketing slight of hand to get you to pay up for literally nothing. Meanwhile, whatever costs are associated with actually running XBL/PSN are more than covered by the fact that Sony/MS take at least 40% of every digital sale from their store-front via distributor's fees and royalties, on top of being paid to advertise games on their store and selling your browsing/purchasing information.
>"Why should I pay?"
You shouldn't, and the only reason why anybody even does is because of a soft-extortion scam where Sony/MS break core functionality of the most popular features of their games if you don't sign up for their game of the month clubs.