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: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.

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: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:$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.

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.