Xbox Live Price Hike
by SynRaptor on Aug.31, 2010, under Gamer Rages
I’ve always been a fan of Xbox Live and while I love talking to all my friends online and playing games with them, I’ve always vocally disagreed with the fee you have to pay for Xbox Live. Today I heard that the price was going to increase in November by $10 (which is about £7 for us in the UK). I found this ridiculous statement of Microsoft justifying it:
“Since launching Xbox Live in 2002 we have continually added more content and entertainment experiences for our members, while keeping the price the same. We’re confident that when the new pricing takes effect, an Xbox Live Gold membership will continue to offer the best value in the industry.”
– Larry Hryb, director of programming at Xbox Live
Well Larry, I think you should award yourself a 100G achievement for managing to cockslap all the Xbox Live users and laughing simultaneously whilst writing that nonsense because that’s no excuse for hiking the price up.
So what content are we paying for? Facebook? Twitter? Gee anyone with a computer and half a stagnating brain cell can access that!
Zune Videos…which you have to pay for each individual video, so where is the benefit of that?
Last.fm plays a load of songs RELATED to the artist you’re looking for but not actually a playlist of your favourite artists. So yeah the value for money keeps on going up.
But the thing that gets me, is that they reckon its the best value in the industry…considering that Wii Online and Playstation world are both FREE, then please explain to me how this is the best value.
Free DLC would constitute better value but considering Xbox charge you for putting a gay t-shirt on your avatar or changing the theme to something less drab than a green puddle then I fail to see this value they’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I love coming online and playing with all my friends and while talking to your friends for hours as a free phone call I suppose covers this value they’re talking about, but since Playstation doesn’t charge you for that I find it a bit hard to swallow.
I will continue my Xbox Live subscription to be fair and while it may be perceived that I’m moaning, I’m not as much as I could do, but at the same time I probably wouldn’t have noticed the slight price increase to much but the fact that they had to come out and try and justify it gives me a bit of a nervous twitch.
September 1st, 2010 on 5:59 pm
Other than my XBox that is lol
How can they justify charging more? there’s nothing free on there other than voice chat. Which, as you mentioned, Sony give you for free. Sony also have an online world like Second Life where you can walk around, chat, play pool etc. And it’s all FREE Microsoft, you bunch of money hungry ass holes.
Unfortunately I enjoy playing games online and as most of them only come out on the XBox I guess I’m stuck paying whatever they’ll charge. Charming Microsoft, just charming.