Edit: Online Multiplayer, not services in general.

With all the passiveness from most Console players around the world, do you think that this cancer is going to affect PC stores as well?

Also, I heard Microsoft tried to charge PC players for online multiplayer in the past and people complained so much they decided to keep services free, did this really happen?

Cheers.

Its not beyond the realms of possibilty that Steam might charge for a top tier service.

Its worth noting the SSA and valves captive audience makes this a very easy and possible move

what?

I just bought five games with your credit card; does that count? :D

I thought about that as well. I'm not against charging for a newly introduced online service, but it's frustrating having to pay for something that have been always free,

Note that's just my opinion so I'd like say everyone to not take to their personal side. Very thanks

If you mean charge a store-front level subscription fee just to access games you've bought, then GOG's naturally immune to that due to providing offline DRM-Free installers (if you've downloaded GOG installers and backed them up onto a local backup HDD, the entire Internet could disappear and it wouldn't affect you). In theory Steam, uPlay, etc, can technically throw up additional future barriers to log-on / access games, in practise I'm not sure how that would legally work for restricting games already bought prior to subscribing (effectively charging twice). I certainly smell a few lawsuits if any store did attempt to do that.

If you mean subscription fees for "Games as a Service" streaming, that's done on a publisher level (EA, Ubisoft, etc) not a store-front level (Steam or GOG). I can easily see EA, Ubisoft trying to push game-streaming, but I can also see a lot of people being against it, plus the fact video game streaming is significantly more complex than how Netflix / Spotify work, and they're going to repeatedly be met with complaints about lag, high pings, etc, regardless of how much money they throw at it.

Why would they?

Now I see I had not expressed myself properly. The service I mean is Online Multiplayer, that they've been blocking behind a paywall. Very informative post, though. Thanks

Because you can never get enough money.
They'd probably word it something like "we're doing this to better serve you"

I take it you never watched the Noclip docu on GOG, then?

I should've clarified I meant Steam

Well, who knows. Internally Valve doesn't even have proper organization so a thought like that may have occurred and got lost somewhere already.

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I think the only reasonable path to that is via deprecating then ultimately removing single-player from games, which seems like something that couldn't really be done except as a portion of the market. But if you could, let's say with Borderlands 5 in fifteen years, the path would probably be ->games-as-a-service->deprecate single player->premium server fees for private-lobby multiplayer->all server fees incorporated into the service plan. Games-as-a-service is not a guaranteed leap, though, and as long it's possible to buy a license for a game and not just buy a license for a service, I don't think you can make a path to mandatory charges for online services. Optional charges, though? Those have been around for a decade or more already, since the broad incorporation of free-to-play into online games, if not earlier.

I'm assuming you mean like console style online subscriptions.
I'm going to say no, the difference being that if you want to play online on a PlayStation you presumably have to use Sony's infrastructure (at least in some way) and ditto for Nintendo and Microsoft.

On PC there is no similar situation, any game sold on Steam could incorporate it's own online services which Valve couldn't stop you from using, and if they started charging for the Steam integration they provide (whatever multiplayer / matchmaking services are part of Steam) I imagine they would quickly lose a lot of developers who would no longer see it as a quick and easy solution, particularly when no one was playing their games or players were complaining about having to pay to play.

So I would say it's highly unlikely, and doesn't really make any business sense as it removes one of the draws of buying and selling on Steam and puts it behind a paywall.