Xbox Live Pricing To Go Up To $60 Per Year 199
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."
Makes Sense (Score:5, Funny)
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heya,
Depends - are we talking real girlfriends, or virtual?
Because speaking from experience, the former is often enough for you to buy Xbox live membership for your street...lol.
Cheers,
Victor
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Lock in at $40 (Score:5, Informative)
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]
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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:Lock in at $40 (Score:5, Interesting)
Still a good deal though (thxs), even if it's just for a year. Personally, I'm on the fence about renewing now ... for $40 I'll probably renew it, but at $60 it's probable I won't next year.
Lately, all I've used my M$ Xbox Live for is Netflix and very rarely for games. The Xbox is the fastest/most convenient way of watching Netflix ... but if the price goes up and I don't find myself playing Live games any more over the next few months, it'll be time to drop it in favor of just watching it through the PC.
Of course, then I'll need to buy myself that silly DisplayPort adapter so I can output to the TV and both monitors at the same time from the PC instead of having to choose 2 of 3 screens already connected via the other ports, but that's another story/rant...
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Funny, I'm in almost the same boat and I don't mind at all. Granted, $60 means that it'll likely be $50 from Amazon (It's now $40 on Amazon, as opposed to $50 from Microsoft), but still $60 is $5/month. That's a single beer in a bar, once a month. For the (very little) I get out of Xbox Live Gold, I think $5 a month is worth it.
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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.
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Can't I buy that to lock in this year - And go to HMV and buy like ten $40 Gold Live cards, for the next ten years? Or will those no cards longer be valid after November 1, and if so do I get refunded?
If not 360 or Windows, then what? (Score:2)
Or you can save yourself $60 by not paying MS anything.
So if Xbox 360 and Windows PC are out of the question because they are controlled by Microsoft, which platform do you recommend for gaming?
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yes, because sony is the yardstick of corporate morallity, with no reputation for being underhanded bastards at all..
Honestly, both companies are evil and suck, but IMHO sony is way ahead of MS. requiring the removal on functionality you originally bought with the machine...
Honestly, i dislike microsoft for some things they screwed up with windows (and i personally prefer not using windows), but compared to sony/apple/oracle, they are just the lumbering clumbsy giant of the tech world (and their CEO happens
wow (Score:2)
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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.
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My area doesn't get Hulu, Netflix or Sky TV. Shouldn't I qualify for a discount then?
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At $5/month from every Gold subscriber, they should be hosting every match. If all they're going to do is matchmaking and advertising, they can do that at no cost to the end user.
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According to my calculator, that is DIVBYZERO times more than their competitors!
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You have an odd way of viewing things. You pay for them to host Marketplace content? Whaaaat? Marketplace content is either advertising (trailers, demos) or content you pay for. And you don't have to be a Gold subscriber to get the privilege of paying for that content. I know.. its a shock. They want you to buy things even if you don't buy Gold. Who'd have thought.
Its also funny how other consoles, and PC systems, have access to that sort of stuff, and multiplayer policing, and matchmaking, and rankings ...
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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.
Check the 8-year inflation rate (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Boo (Score:2)
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$10 divided by the 52 hours you spend talking to your brother on Xbox Live == $0.19 an hour extra you are paying. How much is a long distance phone plan?
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$10 divided by the 52 hours you spend talking to your brother on Xbox Live == $0.19 an hour extra you are paying. How much is a long distance phone plan?
If he's anything like the average Xbox player, he probably has a cell phone and doesn't pay anything extra for long distance. Depending on when that hour is, it's likely a call made at that time would not even consume his monthly allotment of minutes.
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My point is, "one size fits all" pricing is a terrible deal for light users like myself, and decreases the value of the XBox 360 relative to other options (like the PS3).
They can get away with it by pointing to Sony... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the timing of this isn't a coincidence, given that Sony recently just launched their own pay-to-play subscription service, PSN Plus? They can claim that this is just the going rate, nowadays...
Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They can get away with it by pointing to Sony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony's not putting Netflix behind some bizarre paywall either.
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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.
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Sony may have stated such a thing, but I doubt it. Netflix works without PSN+, and has done so since before PSN+ was rolled out.
Hulu Plus may or may not be available to free PSN. I don't know, can't check.
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Seriously, the ability for me to buy a game and have my friends play with me has made me buy more stuff than I have ever bought from any game company.
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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...
$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.
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I'm not saying it's a huge amount, or that MS doesn't provide something in return, I'm questioning the analysts' assertion that this should be expected because their costs will be going up.
With hardware becoming both cheaper and more powerful, their costs should have been coming down rapidly over time, and should be a fraction (half, at most) of what they were when XBox Live first launched. Or am I missing costs that aren't going to be hardware related?
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I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number,
Because it is. $50 or $60 over the lifetime of a console means an additional $300 or more you have to pay, it is basically doubling the price of the console and just because that cost is spread out over a few years doesn't make it go away.
The real joke of course is that people pay that money in expectation of good service, but yet you still see Sega pulling the plug on Chromehounds or EA pulling it on all their not-current sport games or heck even Microsoft itself pulling it on the whole Xbox1 network.
Re:$5 a month (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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That kind of environment doesn't pay for itself.
Shame Blizzard isn't making any money off of SC2.
SC2 has all those features you listed: running through dedicated servers, matchmaking, tracking, moderators banning people who cheat, etc.
Shame S2 Games isn't making any money on HoN, either.
Yes, I realize these are both PC games. Consoles are PCs. Networking them is no different than networking PCs. Game devs making shitty assumptions about the security of consoles compared to PCs is no excuse for exorbitant fees to try to weed out behavior that exposes that
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That kind of environment doesn't pay for itself. If you don't like it, the PC market is still alive.
Well, sort of. Except that the same companies that are forcing us to go through centralized admin/anti-cheat servers (and according to you pay for the service) are doing the same in the PC space, minus having to pay for it (so far). Every PC gamer I know was quite content with self-governed, privately-hosted servers where the publisher incurs zero cost for hosting games, but for some reason we are being forced to only play on centralized servers in the newer games.
I'm sure very soon will be asked to pay for
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?
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What the GP said. PC gaming is almost dead for me because of it, and consoles are not a way out.
Unless you just are wasting time, then read what I wrote above. Otherwise disregard that rambling crap.
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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. Unfort
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enter StarCraft 2. (Score:2)
My nephew came to visit for the weekend a few weeks back and we were going to pick up a copy of StarCraft 2, spawn out a LAN game, and teach the kid the ropes. (Hadn't really followed the news on the game, shocking, I know.)
No spawning out. No LAN games, everything routes out through Battle.net. So even if I *were* willing to drop $180 to teach a kid (myself, my wife, and my nephew) how to play StarCraft, and even though all three of us are on the same LAN segment (albeit, via wifi) - we would all have t
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My thoughts exactly. I wanted to play some console games (fairly casual player) and I wanted a good Blu-ray player. I didnt' want Halo and a lifetime $5 month service charge to play a few online games that I can play on PS3 for free.
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Really? I thought it was to pay for the foul-mouthed 9 year old to remind you what a fag you are.
My son is 11, you insensitive clod!
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Next thing you know, game developers will also want their fair share of the profits from online play.
That's not "next"; that's now. See EverQuest, Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft, and any other subscription MMO game.
What happened to paying $20-$30 for a game
That was the NES lockout chip and related mechanisms to artificially inflate the cost of developing for a dedicated video game console.
with multiplayer
That was 350p. In the 1980s, computer gaming moved from 8-bit microcomputers, which had a composite video output, to 16-bit microcomputers such as IBM PC and Macintosh, most of which forwent 240p or 288p SDTV output in favor of a 350-line signal to improve
Greedy (Score:5, Interesting)
Live is a portal that provides the following:
- Targeted Advertising, which makes Microsoft money
- Media purchasing avenue (Games, Videos, Add-ons, etc), which makes Microsoft money
- Multiplayer functionality around games which make Microsoft Money
- Subscription Fee, which makes Microsoft money
Only cost that has no/little return is from people who play multilayer constantly and somehow avoids seeing any of the advertisements.
This is really just a profit grab. I can't really blame them since they don't have to compete with anyone for their existing install base, but it does irk me.
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Re:Greedy (Score:4, Informative)
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).
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The PS3 can take any image and turn it into wallpaper while the 360 can't. (Gotta pinch that penny!)
The PS3 can use any external hard drive, can use any laptop hard drive internally, can use any keyboard, any camera, any printer, as well as letting you backup to external thumb drives / hard drives, etc. 360 Charges you massive money while refusing competition.
And most importantly, the PS3 only took away the Linux OS af
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They slashed support for maybe a couple of thousand users (the vast majority of whom were playing Halo 2) so they could supply the millions more users with features people have wanted. If you want, Halo 2 PC still plays via Games for Windows Live - the same Live network and linked to your Xbox Live account. But the Xbox was holding back Xbox Live and fe
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.
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 - $40. I wonder if the sale price will go up too. I think I'm good until around March, which means I'll have to renew to play Gears 3, *groan*
When live first came out it was a great thing. No one else had that level of seemless match making, game joining, friends list, etc. But now the PC has things like Steam and XFire *for free* so Live just seems like a rip off.
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I can routinely find cards online for 35$ so I don't know if it is a sale.
Though I might buy a few just in case the price fluctuates a bit too much.
That said the value add is mostly worth the purchase cost when compared to something such as Sony's current offering.
I have always scratched my head at why Microsoft attempts to limit it's own audience. While I have no figures I would assume there is a healthy number of users who are happy to purchase DLC, avatar bling and movies. I know I have purchased a few s
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>>I wonder how many people will actually pay $60 though.
Not me. I don't play enough to warrant $60/year... I have a bunch of short duration cards, and just pop one of those off when I get a new 360-exclusive that I want to play online with friends.
Not paying for Plus, either, and I buy about 3x as many PS3 games than 360 games, due to the above reason.
I just don't see Gold being worth any money at all, to be perfectly frank. The digital downloads I buy should be enough to support their infrastructure,
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Why did they take it offline? Why, if they need this extra $10 so much, didn't they start offering it for 600 points?
I know they were network testing but surely, with the thousands of players online playing, it was a money-maker?
Oh, and back ontopic, no one with any sense pays the full price for Live. eBay is your friend.
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I have Netflix and a 360 and would like to have Gold so I can watch Netflix, but I told myself I would buy it if they lowered the price. Microsoft just failed big-time, because not only will they lose some customers (no matter how numerous, or not) they are also missing the chance to rope in a large number of customers who were considering Gold but will never, ever pay them so much for a matching service on a console that already wastes my bandwidth with adverts.
My next console machine will apparently be no
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Let's get one thing Straight: Xbox Live Silver is free. 1 lifetime Silver account comes with your XBox. With that, you get
- Media purchasing avenue (Games, Videos, Music, Add-ons, Themes, etc)
- Chat with friends online and a way to compare achievements easily
- Some Basic Features, such as free demos, Xbox News updates, Facebook, etc
With A Gold Membership, the only thing you really pay for is the Multiplayer Functionality. At 60 dollars for 12 months, that's 5 bucks a month. In comparison, lets say going to
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Why compare it with something unrelated (going to the movies) when you can compare it to the competition. Neither Sony, Nintendo or PC games make you pay to play online.
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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
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Are you kidding? PC gaming, Steam, PSN and even the Wii are all free to play online, not to mention handhelds. In effect, even their own Xbox offline play titles are competing against the $60 play online tax.
The Live subscription fee might have made sense in 2003 when online multiplayer was still a novel feature for most players, but as the years go by its becoming more and more difficult to justify paying
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Well, it's $5 a month. Lots of people spend about that at Starbucks every *day* of the week, so I don't it's really a show-stopper price...
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This is really just a profit grab. I can't really blame them since they don't have to compete with anyone for their existing install base, but it does irk me.
Not totally true. I switched from a 360 and bought a PS3. I have an original 360 model which is collecting dust now. What tipped me over was that if I wanted a bigger hard drive and HDMI, I would have had to pay Microsoft's exorbitant markup. The 360 was also a noisy beast. The PS3 was well designed from day one, with free multiplayer, blu-ray, commodity hard drives, and Bluetooth. When the Slim came out for $300, I switched.
Cost vs Service (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not seeing why Xbox live costs as much as it does now, let alone why there would be a price increase.
And really, MS shouldn't give Sony a foo
No Ads? (Score:2)
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I fucking hate the AD-BOX 360. :) Everytime I turn it on, advertisements. The ads come up before you can even switch menu to go to your account, or games...
Microsoft may have a decent online platform for a console... but they killed it for me, and I went back to PC gaming where I can play a game with out a cocaine addict screaming "yeah nigga.. yeah headshot nigga!?" and then have a 12 year old chime in with the same "Hell yeah head shot niggggggggga"
I'll take Starcraft 2, Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, T
Sony screwing their customers? (Score:2)
What exact value is XBL Gold giving anyway? It's totally bizarre.
One of the reasons I bought a PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)
The final decision that tipped me toward the PS3 and away from the Xbox360 was the fact that playing online games on the PS3 is free. I hadn't even considered the fact that Microsoft would eventually increase the fee for their service.
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Add in that the Nintendo Wii does the same as the PS3, and this makes the XBox Live price increase ludicrously laughable. I just shake my head and laugh whenever someone asks me why I don't have an XBox after I tell them I don't.
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The only PS3 game that I've played online so far is CoD:MW2. That game seems to put the hosting off on the client. It does not have a true dedicate server feature, but it does allow you to setup a private match. I'm still neutral about dedicated servers. I appreciate the community the arises around a dedicate server. On the other hand, the lack of a dedicated server doesn't bum me out (other than when I really want to play one specific map).
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the servers are maintained by the publishers and they can pull the plug any time, leaving games without the online component.
That can happen on XboxLive too. Sega pulled the plug on ChromeHounds and EA is regularly pulling the plug on their sport games and of course the whole Xbox1 live support disappeared.
Even with the PC things are starting to get more troublesome with more and more developers moving to solutions that require their servers to be involved instead of user hosted stuff.
Screw it. (Score:2)
For what I get out of XBL, $60 USD ain't worth it.
Especially when I can just log into Steam on my PC and play lots of fun games online for free.
$100 a year (Score:2)
I have a feeling XBox Live could increase up to $100 per year and everyone would still do it. Anymore than that and they'd probably start losing a few subscribers.
Alternative: Family Pack (Score:2)
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I don't mind paying something, but I do mind ads (Score:2)
I don't mind so much paying for "Gold level." What I do mind, however, is that they still feel the need to stick all kinds of ads in the service. In fact, they now have motion/sound ads that start when you scroll to the line it's on. At this point, if it wasn't for my family using it to stream Netflix, I'd probably just let it lapse.
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.
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His point is that not everyone who initially bought an Xbox (any generation) immediately purchased an XBox live account.
So even though they moved less units last year that doesnt necessarily mean they will have less Live subscribers.
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:Perhaps you've never heard of saturation (Score:5, Funny)
There are only so many people that want game consoles. The idea that their sales will go up and up forever is silly.
Although they did try to address this with a 50%+ failure rate in the first year...
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Those systems were already made. They weren't making Sony any money in warehouses or sitting on store shelves.
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You must not have attended college 1999-2004 where every dorm room, common area or frat house had one and was playing Super Smash Brothers near 24/7
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The figures you quote for the profit/loss on a console sale are based on launch prices. Component prices fall over time (generally faster than console prices fall) and in general a console will edge back into profit on each unit sold somewhere around the middle of its cycle. I believe both the PS3 and 360 now generally sell at a profit (albeit not much of one).
But yes, the money is in games sales, rather than in system sales. The reason why console games tend
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I have a PS3, so mine's still free, so ha ha!
Or at least, it would be, if didn't have to stick with firmware 3.20 to keep OtherOS. :(
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Oh yes, open source is "cheat proof." Just take the source code, and:
if me (add points) .7)
if them (success_probability *
if me (armor x5)
if them (speed *.88)
if me (radar_range x 2)
if them (fuel_consumption * 1.25)
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