| mothman said: I pay for PSN+ and have since the first day it was offered. I'm quite happy with it right now. They've included a ton of games for my 50 bucks a year some of which don't even expire if I cancel my subscription. On the other hand I've cancelled my Xbox Gold subscription because I was paying $60 for, well nothing actually. Once my son got tired of running around the same maps shooting his friends I had no reason to keep it. I only play single player games and download the odd demo. Bottom line: if Sony charges and actually gives me value for my money like including a couple of games a month for free and others at a discount then I'm in. If like Xbox live I have to pay for nothing I'm out. |
Still haven't figured out why more people aren't in the same position or at least point it out if they are. If I had to guess, it's because people that are fully invested in the Xbox ecosystem have always been paying for XBL and assuming they still use the service with any sort of regularity, have simply accepted it as an added expense of gaming on the Xbox. MS doesn't need to give free access to games or discounts because they were never a part of XBL Gold.
As someone who started with PSN in the initial days where it offered little more than online play and gradually evolved into a service that was on par with XBL, and someone who was never more than an off and on user of XBL, my $50-60 a year would essentially be paying for maybe 2-3 weeks of online play per game for the rare Xbox exclusive, which has slowed to 1 or 2 games a year in terms of games that I have any desire to buy. Poor value. But, a lot of players tend to play the same online game(s) for months if not years between franchise updates and clearly still get their value from a subscription even if they only buy a few games per year. If one buys most of their games for the Xbox, it goes without saying you have to subscribe to Gold if you want the most out of your games.
XBL Gold does offer a considerable amount of services and features; by contrast XBL Silver is little more than a portal to enable access to a paid Gold account (other than demos and videos, which are the main feature of Silver). Without Gold, the Xbox essentially becomes a single player/local multiplayer platform. So the XBL model effectlvely takes away as a means to promote paid subscriptions. But in reducing the utility of the platform, it also makes it considerably less attractive to play on which can result in inactive consoles.
PSN Plus, by contrast provides additional services and features (some of which could have been free features other than cloud storage which does take server space/money to maintain), in particular, discounts on PSN purchases, making it a clear value to anyone invested in the PSN ecosystem and presumably buys a substantial amount of DD content. Even if not, Plus does offer a considerable amount of free games for current subscribers. The Plus model effectively gives more as a means of promoting paid subscriptions without making them necessary to gain access to the majority of the PS3 platform's features. But that's still irrelevant if the PS3 isn't used with regularity.
Regardless of which offers better value in terms of content for subscription fees, it still boils down to which service the consumer prefers to use, and to a larger extent, which ecosystem they prefer to game in is largely dependent upon where that person's friends/family play.
