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Xbox Live Pricing Revealed
Xs writes "For those of you wondering how much it will cost to play online when your year of free Xbox Live runs out, listen up. Microsoft has just unveiled their pricing plan for Xbox Live. Pretty cheap, too! You will be given two options: one is to pay for a full year of service, that will cost you $49.99. Second option is to pay by the month, that will set you back $5.99 a month. The Xbox Live starter kit is also getting a new price of $69.99. Plus, MS will also start selling the voice communicators by themselves - they'll retail for $29.99." Sounds like a pretty good deal.
Is to see what the price will be in one or two years time if it takes off. The price was always going to be good to start with. All the better to get as many people using it as possible.
1. Microsoft wants to recover the subscription fee (or the bulk of it) with every starter kit purchase. Given the inclusion of a game, demos and hardware, leaving it at the same price means that those subscribers are getting a discount on a service that's already rolling nicely.
2. The price hike means slightly less pain for Microsoft if current subscribers decide to abandon their current account in favor of getting a new starter kit, because they want the included game, they've ruined their rep on the service or both. They'll still lose a bit on packaging and the software included, but a lot less than if they included the hardware (as in #1).
3. They can justify charging more (if you consider it a price increase rather than finally getting charged for the hardware) for the service because it will be more mature, have many more subscribers and will have many more games than at the start.
Finally, I'd just say that the price increase is NOT immediate. You can go out and get a starter kit today for the $50 price with the hardware. Even if you don't want to sign up right away, you can buy it and simply hold it. Unless I'm mistaken, the current version of the kit (the one that comes with Tetris) has a subscription code that can be activated anytime between now and October 31st. By then, there will be a game type to please just about anyone and people who do it this way will still [hopefully] have several months of Halo 2 action(first quarter 2004 is the current release projection). :)
You mean online gaming where people aren't cheating like dogs...
Actually looks promising for that reason alone.
I don't think $50.00/year is unreasonable for hack/cheat-free online gaming, something you don't get on the PC. Additionally if you look at the economics of it from a non-PC owner perspective, (You mean I have to spend $1200 on a PC to play Half-Life 2 online but after that it's free?) the X-Box is a pretty good deal (especially after the upcoming price drop). There is practically no motivation for someone who doesn't own a PC to purchase one just to game as opposed to a console. I've really enjoyed PC gaming but the upgrade cycle is can be pretty steep. I've been very tempted to purchase an X-Box, it'll be cheaper than my last video card and a lot cheaper than the upgrades my older PC would need to keep up with the system requirements of some of the newer games.
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