Xbox Live Pricing To Go Up To $60 Per Year 199
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the nickles-and-dimes dept.
from the nickles-and-dimes dept.
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."
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
All those extra features with no ongoing costs, and it's a real pity computer services aren't getting cheaper... No, wait...
Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Physics majors cringe (Score:4, Insightful)
... except that everyone who owns an XBox is a potential customer for XBox live.
XBox sales don't need to increase or even maintain for the installed base of the system to be increasing.
In a sense your physics is right but your math, or at least your applied math, is bad.
Perhaps you've never heard of saturation (Score:5, Insightful)
There are only so many people that want game consoles. The idea that their sales will go up and up forever is silly. Never happened in the past. They sell a lot when they come out, maybe even at an increasing rate as they drop in price and become popular, however they then decline as they age and most people who want one own one.
Also the real money in consoles is not made on the hardware, it is on the software. The hardware is sold for a fairly minimal profit at best, and sometimes sold for a loss (the 360 was sold at a loss when it launched). The money is made in the games and services. You have to pay a per copy sold licensing fee to release a game on a console. So you make real money in selling lots of games people want, and on having services (like Xbox live) they pay for.
Of course you do need console owners for that, so console sales aren't irrelevant, but if you sell tens of millions of consoles and your sales ramp off, that's fine, so long as people buy stuff for them.
Re:Cost vs Service (Score:1, Insightful)
Halo is about to come out. That's why the big push to either get people to up for a year or pay 60/month to play Halo with friends for a few months.
Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony's not putting Netflix behind some bizarre paywall either.
Re:Greedy (Score:4, Insightful)
And how many multiplayer games are hosted by one of the player's consoles, rather than a Microsoft server? I haven't played all that many XBL games, admittedly, but only one of them was not hosted on a 360 in the match.
$5 a month (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number, but do the math: $60 per year is $5 a month. That cost is nothing compared to what you're already paying for Internet or cable TV service.
Re:Greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, seriously. You forgot things like Netflix, which requires a live subscription AND a Netflix subscription.
At least when they had 1v100 I felt like I was getting a little value add, but now it just seems like a ripoff. I wonder how many people will actually pay $60 though. When the price was $50, the subscription cards periodically went on sale for $35 - $40. I wonder if the sale price will go up too. I think I'm good until around March, which means I'll have to renew to play Gears 3, *groan*
When live first came out it was a great thing. No one else had that level of seemless match making, game joining, friends list, etc. But now the PC has things like Steam and XFire *for free* so Live just seems like a rip off.
Re:Perhaps you've never heard of saturation (Score:1, Insightful)
The original Xbox was sold at a loss of $23 per unit. The Xbox 360 was sold at a loss of $71 per unit.
The PS2 was sold at a loss of $189 per unit.
The PS3 was orignally sold at a loss of $250 per unit.
Sony has never charged for online gaming.
Microsoft has always charged for online gaming.
The money has always, for every system, been in software sales, until the wii came out.
Re:$5 a month (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes. And I'm already paying for internet service. I'm paying for internet service. Online play is internet service. Online play is internet service. I'm already paying the person who provides my internet access to be able to play online. And MS asking my to pay them, too. 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. So you're paying $50/month for internet access, $60/year for XBL server access, and another $60/year to unlock multiplayer in a game you've payed for, payed for access to the internet for, and paid for the ability to access the server of. What happened to paying $20-$30 for a game, with multiplayer, with servers, with no monthly fee, except that of your ISP charging for internet access?
And they were good games, too.
Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask Microsoft how they can do it. That's exactly what they do. You have to be a gold subscriber in order to use the Netflix app/dashboard/whatever you call it on 360.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
New UI and Avatars .. available to people who don't pay for Gold.
Paying gets you multiplayer, access to Hulu Plus (if you pay for that and are in the US), Netflix (if you pay for that), Sky TV (if you pay for that and are in the UK), and similar services in Portugal or Australia.
So, really, what you pay for is multiplayer.. that they don't even host. They do the matchmaking and get out of the way.
Re:Greedy (Score:1, Insightful)
Thats $5 a month more than everyone else.
PSN free
Wii free
PC free
Xbox... whoops M$ ripoff gouging here we come... Mind you it took long enough to make silver the default free offering.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
An increase every so often because of inflation would be expected
20% inflation? In an industry where processing AND bandwidth AND storage gets cheaper by the day?
And most of the labour is continually outsourced to where ever it is cheapest?
And the incremental cost of adding users benefits from economies of scale?
Realistically the costs could well be going down, and profitability going up.
They are raising the price because they can.
Re:Greedy (Score:3, Insightful)
You are missing the point completely. With the PS3, customers get to play the multiplayer portion of the games they own(which, incidentally, we paid $60 for the single and multiplayer portion) for free. It does not cost $50 or $60 USD to do that with a PS3.
Microsoft charges customers $60 per game, then forces customer to pay another $50(about to be $60) per year to play a portion of the game that was already paid for. It would be like a customer purchasing a movie on DVD or Blu-ray, then having to pay a yearly fee to watch the extra features...except that multiplayer on most games (that have multiplayer) is one of the main selling points(MW2, Halo, etc).
Microsoft adds all of the functionality, then acts like it is something everyone has been asking for. The fact is that I never asked for it, and I am sure most people did not ask for it either. While Microsoft acts like it is costing them money to provide these features, I am sure Microsoft is generating income through advertisements that these "features" provide.
I do not care about ESPN 3, or Facebook, or any of that other shit; I just want to play the multiplayer portion of the games I own and forget the rest. Hell, a lot of it is just paywall-linked content(purchasing movies, having a subscription of Netflix, and other shit). There is not any added value to Xbox Live Gold when you break it down. This is all just Microsoft fucking over customers and making a killing from it.
As such, I have canceled my Xbox Live Gold account.
Re:$5 a month (Score:1, Insightful)
Number of games in SC2: 1
Number of games in Xbox: shitloads
Sorry, what was that again?
Re:$5 a month (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the long rant? Because yes, the PC market is still alive. Barely. Every new game I play has a company-run server, and no private or lan server available. And every one of them is filled with douchebags, racists/bigots/homophobes, rage-quitters, and teens who think cussing is the most awesome thing ever invented. It's shocking coming from such an amazing game playing experience for the last ten years or so. Our servers are great. I've not yet found a public server that holds a candle to ours. When your players earn you money, you have a vested interest in enfocing civility as little as possible. When you're like us, and have no financial or logistical or moral reason to tolerate any sort of douchebaggery, your servers are like heaven.
I'm not going to be playing PC games much longer if I'm not allowed to run my own server, and I'm forced to deal with shitheads all the time. However, I'm not going to be playing console games either, since they have the same problems, except tons more lockdown of the hardware, software, subscription requirements in some cases, etc.
Take away the ability for the hobbiests to run and police their own servers, and civil gaming is all but dead. I'm not sure how the group of great people I play games with would have ever gotten together if it wasn't for us having a lot of fun on some really quality servers. Now, you have games like League of Legends running "take a picture of you playing a LAN game and having fun and win prizes!!!!!" contests, despite there being no LAN client, and no private servers. Apparently for them, and for most other companies these days, it seems, "LAN party" means, "Bunch of you in a room, on a HARDCORE FUCKING CONNECTION, all playing on our servers. With all the issues with latency and bandwidth and shit you'd have had if you were at home. Doing something that you could have done in your individual houses. Am I the only one that remembers what a LAN party is, and what makes it special?
Re:$5 a month (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, LAN parties... haven't been to one in a long time. My memory is of playing C&C Generals against another team and "strategically" taking out my best friend's bulldozers right quick. I knew he was the only real threat, and by building airplanes early I was so undefended, but once he was off the board... well, we stomped the rest!
I too like having dedicated servers; my clan used to run one for UT2k4 - was an excellent way to get to know the good players, and an easy way to get rid of the bad. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize that in the real world it costs $$ to run one (if you want full access to a single box, 100-150$ a month is not uncommon in a decent data center) - and I would gather that most people from a console perspective cannot "host" a game due to the upload bandwidth restrictions on most USA connections.
Re:Lock in at $40 (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why it's better to pick up a few 12 month cards on sale between now and November, save a few bucks, and choose to use them or resell them as you wish. I've seen posts where people have Gold memberships paid up to 2013, so likely you can use multiple codes now if you don't want to risk losing the cards.
And an increase of $0.84 a month really counts for a greed tag? Really /.? Would you rather go back to paying the same $50 for the features LIVE had in 2002? Not having a price increase for 8 years seems like a good deal to me. Think about what they can do in the next 8 years now that they don't have the old system weighing it down.
If you're about to say that it took 8 years for them to add enough features to be worth $50, I will kick you in the shins. You don't get to play in our fort.
Re:Perhaps you've never heard of saturation (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, I guess this is just a WHOOSH kind of day! The whole point is that those systems were actually worth more to Sony sitting on a shelf or in a warehouse than sold to researchers, because at least with the shelf or warehouse there is the potential to sell it to a gamer whereas the researchers are a guaranteed loss of revenue for Sony.
Its really very simple GrumblyStuff...Sony sells you a piece of kit that cost them $600 for $400 or less in the hope you'll buy enough games for it for them to make a healthy profit. If you buy a half dozen PS3s to use for a HPC then they have lost $1200 selling to you which they will never make up, because you have no desire to use those 6 machines to play CoD or any other AAA titles. So in this case I'm afraid you're 100% wrong as the unit is definitely worth more to Sony on a shelf than in the hands of a researcher. I personally wouldn't be surprised if Sony lost several million selling PS3s that are now used for research.
Re:Makes Sense (Score:3, Insightful)