How dare they charge 5 bucks a month to pay for all those servers and bandwidth.
Deuce just admit you're mad that this isn't something you can pirate for free
It was only a matter of time before they charged, and while it was nice to play online for free for all that time, there is just way too much network maintenance required to not charge a fee.
They better improve their server quality if so.
Of course, and that is going to be the expectation from consumers.
The quality of service will definitely be expected to improve, and I'm sure it will. While I'm a playstation whore, I know that Xbox live's online interface is leaps and bounds better than Sony's, and you'd be a fool to think that the quality isn't a result of the funds they have coming in via their online service fee.
As I said before, you're basically having to pay for their existing premium service which already exists in order to play online on the PS4. For someone who already subscribes to PS+, I can tell you that it's actually a great deal that you're going to enjoy all the current benefits while also being able to play online. They probably could've charged an extra few bucks to add online play to the already existing service or separated the two services and charged a separate fee for both - one for only online play, and one fore PS+ with online play. The fact that they combined the two at no extra cost is a good deal, IMO.
While most of you aren't gaming wackos like me, you guys do play most of the titles they give you for free. We aren't talking about crappy games here, some of the very best games on the console have been made available for free to PS+ users. The Uncharted games, the Batman Arkham games, Bioshocks......these are AAA titles that they give you for being a PS+ member. And if you share your Playstation with your kids, then there are a ton of other games that will appeal to them that you can download for free that saves you some hassle too.
When you combine all this, then PS+ now becomes a better online service than XBL.