I pirated Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) and played it from start to finish on my Steam Deck because it was impossible to buy. I would’ve paid $20 for that old ass game if it was available for sale, but it was literally impossible.
The problem is that these giant publishers are led by MBAs, and as someone who went to business school, I know first hand how stupid those people are.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services,
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it’s wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren’t a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most “servers” were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They’re a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
“PC” historically refers to devices that are “IBM PC” compatible, although nowadays that mostly means machines with x86 chips… except that powerful ARM desktops, laptops, and servers are becoming a thing too so that’s not accurate either. Plus there’s that whole “Mac vs PC” ad which also makes the term more confusing.
But even going by the recent historical usage, I’d say the Steam Deck qualifies since it has an x86 chip, whereas the PS3 has a weird custom PowerPC cpu (which, ironically, was made by IBM).