Xbox Live Pricing To Go Up To $60 Per Year

donniebaseball23 writes "Microsoft has raised the annual price of Xbox Live Gold to $60, which is a price hike of $10. The new price goes into effect on November 1, but gamers can lock in the current Xbox Live price by renewing now. EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich is not surprised by the move, nor does he think it will really have much impact on the Xbox momentum."

Lock in at $40

[tzenes]

For those of you interested you can lock in your yearly rate at $40 a year (a $10 discount on the current price and $20 on the increased price) by going to this link:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/pricelock/default.htm [xbox.com]

Re:Lock in at $40

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not locking into the yearly rate. You're getting the $40 for this year and then the "regular rate" for the next year when auto renewal comes up.

Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony..

[MaxBooger]

PSN Plus is a superset of PSN, mainly related to the PSN online store. With Plus, they offer beta access to some games, store discounts, free copies of older PSN titles as well as other goodies. The core networking of PSN is untouched and remains free.

Re:$5 a month

[Anonymous Coward]

Next thing you know, game developers will also want their fair share of the profits from online play. Because that's no longer included in the cost of the game. So they'll start charging you.

Yep. Yay for double, triple, and quadruple-dipping!

Oh wait, not 'yay', 'boo-urns'.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/ea-sports-to-charge-10-to-play-used-games-online.ars [arstechnica.com]

Re:$5 a month

[Monkeedude1212]

Turns out that when people wanted Consoles to be a "more equal" platform for online gaming, that meant routing all traffic through proprietary servers.

That's right, even though Halo 3 was designed with P2P hosting/clients in mind, it still has to run through Microsoft Servers in order to weed out hacking and other malicious activities that people try to pull off with an XBox. What you pay for with that 60/year is that service, the matchmaking, the tracking, the moderators who have to ban people, etc.

That kind of environment doesn't pay for itself. If you don't like it, the PC market is still alive.

Re:Greedy

[demonbug]

Just wait, the next rash of games on PSN and they will start requiring a Plus membership in order to play online. Sony arbitrarily yanked OtherOS, I don't put a whole lot of stock in their assurances that they would never, ever, pinky-swear-we-wouldn't, require a plus membership for playing online.

For some reason I get the feeling this is going to crop up around the time I go to buy the next Gran Turismo (though I'm really not all that interested in playing it multiplayer anyway, so whatever).

Check the 8-year inflation rate

[cbhacking]

"20% inflation" implies that they raise the cost like this every year. They don't. They raised the price from its 2002 point.

Inflation figures according to http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl [bls.gov]
$50 in 2002 = $60.59 in 2010.

Also, economies of scale don't necessarily apply. For example, moderation of the player base requires a number if people in direct proportion to the player base, and maybe even a little worse - the more players are, not only the more problem people you have but the more people each of them can piss off. That means a geometrically increasing number of complaints as the player base increases.

Not that I'm not in support of this change; I have a Silver subscription on an Xbox 360 that I got for free, and no intention of purchasing Gold any time soon, so it doesn't really affect me either way. Your post is at best misleading, however.