Haha. Yep. To be fair, I feel that it was actually worth it because it kept a good minimum standard. There was horrible lag back in the day and a lot of cheating/hacking. More so than today.
That is arguable seeing as how good similar PC services are these days. The lack of cheaters on console is the closed ecosystem rather than extra effort by MS/Sony
"To be fair, I feel that it was actually worth it because it kept a good minimum standard. There was horrible lag back in the day and a lot of cheating/hacking. More so than today."
The horrible lag back then was due to peole not having the speeds needed to run games, peoples internet speeds were all over the place. Hacking is as bad today, if not worse than back then. People now have access to sophisticated hacking programmes that were nowhere near as prevalent as they are today. Anticheat software was also available way before Xbox Live and the paid online services became a thing.
I gamed online a lot from 1999 onwards and had great times playing without having issues with people cheating and no one had to pay for an online subscription.
The origin of paid online.