A while back it was confirmed that the price of Xbox LIVE was to increase. The UK was barely affected, but the US saw an increase of $10 to their yearly subscription. Craig Davison, of Microsoft’s Xbox Live marketing, has been talking about why this increase is worth it.
“Now what we’ve always been very passionate about is that quality needs to be there, but more importantly, the consistency. So if I’m playing Halo: Reach, Gears of War, Call of Duty, the consistency of the service and the experience needs to be there regardless of what that entertainment application is.
So that has been critical. As you can imagine, the costs associated with maintaining a service at that level and making sure all of those features are consistent, we’re hitting that quality bar, we’re adding the customer service infrastructure necessary, we’re accommodating all of the same social features and functionality too, there’s a cost. Infrastructure costs, of course. And we’re continuing to bring more and more content.
In 2002 it was strictly multiplayer gaming. Now we get those Call of Duty map packs before anybody else does. We’ve got Gears and Halo, of course, as exclusives. We continue to get exclusives on the service as well. And we’ve gone from 400,000 members in our first year to 25 million.
So during that time, we’ve definitely got to fund it, and we want to add more and more and more. ESPN is a great example. No extra charge for Xbox Live Gold members. But we want to continue to bring that content in. We also want to continue to innovate on all dimensions, whether it’s social, entertainment, or gaming.”
I find myself both nodding and shaking my head simultaneously (ouch). Xbox LIVE was well overdue a price increase, and Microsoft should be congratulated for keeping the price fixed for so long bearing in mind how much the service has grown. The ‘exclusives’ argument is one I have to disagree with though. If CoD map packs, Gears and Halo are the only things that he can come up with, it’s a sad time indeed – surely there’s more than that?
Source: Gamasutra
cc_star
Yes, it was well overdue a price increase and XBL undoubtedly offers the best infrastructure & services if they’d have just talked about that then that would be 100% fine. But, the mentioning of the exclusives has just caused controversy.
Perhaps they’re just reminding people of the platform advantage they have, for the years biggest selling title and its backfired slightly through being lost in translation (from PR speak to gamer speak)
dpb135
Should have just said, been £39.99 for 8 years, time for an increase. Trying to justify it with things like that doesn’t look good. What about people who don’t like those games?
djhsecondnature
My argument against it is, if you could play online without paying, who would pay for Live? Are the additional features price worthy?
stonyk
I agree with this. I used to subscribe to Xbox Live but after 3 years of paying (£120) I thought it was foolish. Now have a PS3 and haven’t paid a penny and it does everything I need – playing games online – thats it.
Xbox Live Silver should allow for online play and anything extra should be included in the gold. That would keep EVERYONE happy then.
Dlaf42
I agree with this online play should be available out the box as with the PS3 and gold should be just for the extra’s. I would even go as far as getting rid of the silver or its new name xbox live free and just have live. Then do the same as plus and have a gold icon next to your tag to say you pay for the gold extra.
cc_star
@Stonyk
Why pay full RRP for your subscription, it’s been available for around £25-£27 during those 3 years
@all
It’s impossible to separate the infrastructure from the services, if they were taking massively less in subscriptions through people paying purely for services then the infrastructure wouldn’t be affordable.
It’s no different to breaking PS+ down and saying why can’t I just pay a massively reduced amount and just have auto updates, or PSOne Classics only, or everything except PSOne & Minis (my preference)… the fact is the service is sustainable because of the package and the packages pricepoint, the same as the whole Xbox network is sustainable because of Gold subscription pricepoint, if it fragmented, so would the platform.
cam the man
The only time I’ve played online with Xbox was for the first three months free trail period. When a game comes out multiplatform I buy the PS3 version as I can play online at no extra cost.
citizeninsane45
‘If CoD map packs, Gears and Halo are the only things that he can come up with, it’s a sad time indeed – surely there’s more than that?’
I agree exactly with that. The users may get the map packs a few weeks early in some instances but they still have to pay for them (well over the odds in my opinion)
samiro05
I just tried nodding and shaking my head :) anyone else?
Bankzy108
I just make circles =[
Matty
Yep I did damn.
SpikeyMikey23
xbox live gets free espn?…..
hazelam
yeah if you’re with one particular isp in the us only.
i think facebook is the only truly free feature you get with gold access.
and maybe twitter, does gold give twitter?
a inferior race
Twitter and Halo Waypoint I think.
hazelam
they neglect to mention, as you would expect, that most people cannot access most of that stuff, and what you can access you most likely also have to pay a separate fee for on top of the sub.
and how many people actually use the crippled version of facebook you get on the xbox?
with the fact we have to host games ourselves i will state categorically never pay for live unless they make major changes to the way it operates, and while people are willing to keep paying ms for the privilege of running their service for them they never will.
hazelam
oh yeah, host advantage ftw. :)
bigdon23
*YAWN* more greed *YAWN*
david
I completely disagree with that pathetic attempt to justify the price increase. Sony provides a very good service that is free why cant MS do the same or at least stop the price increase.
I’m sure it costs Sony to maintain and add to their infrastructure with a similar amount of users on line…
This is MS at it again, nothing more nothing less.
TheDeathAvenger
So they’re basically saying that part of the reason for the price increase is that they pay to delay some DLC on PS3?
PhilipJWitow
Yeah, I read that part of the comments and was like WTF? You’re paying to delay it on the PS3, it’s not a service at all. Regardless of whether you used that money for that or not, Xbox 360 users would get the content at the same time as Sony is not in the business of delaying on Xbox 360.
For shame Microsoft for shame.