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."

Comments

Makes Sense

[chazchaz101]

Well, with the price of gold these days...

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

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:Lock in at $40

[Digicrat]

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...

Re:Lock in at $40

[ArundelCastle]

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.

What?

[Xugumad]

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..

[crabbz]

Sony does not charge to play on PSN. PSN+ gives you access to content, everyone can play.

Re:Physics majors cringe

[Mongoose Disciple]

... 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.

Greedy

[Necreia]

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.

Re:Greedy

[Chewbacon]

Don't forget they phased out Xbox originals support on XBL. So they slashed features and now they're charging more? PSN is looking more appetizing to me now.

Re:Greedy

[Moridin42]

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

[j0nb0y]

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: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).

Re:Greedy

[Montezumaa]

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.

Perhaps you've never heard of saturation

[Sycraft-fu]

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

[stagg]

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...

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

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Sony's not putting Netflix behind some bizarre paywall either.

One of the reasons I bought a PS3

[dave562]

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.

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

[cdrudge]

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

[Moridin42]

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:$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:wow

[vux984]

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:$5 a month

[apoc.famine]

Our UT servers have always been great places to play. Why? We offered the same services you describe the consoles offering, and did it for free, with a happy smile. Got a little server tucked away in a university research lab that a clan member runs, and we police the servers pretty well. It's meant to be a nice, fun, happy place to play games. Douchebags see the door at light speed. Why? There are plenty of non-douchbag players in the world to fill our servers with. And we'd rather it be empty than be filled with douchebags. The end result is that the people who come regularly are fun, polite people to be around. We've made a fair number of friends because of it. While we're competitive, we also like good games. We'll fairly regularly switch from the winning team to the losing team to try to help out. The whole point is that games are meant to be fun for everyone.

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?

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
$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.