By Chris Pereira, 06/13/2012

I have been an Xbox Live subscriber for the better part of the last decade. I've always shrugged off the suggestion that the service should be made available for free; people are more than welcome to take that position, but I've always been personally fine with paying. I've found myself rethinking that position over the last week, and a lot of that is Sony's doing.

Since starting out as a service intent on delivering nothing more than online gaming, Xbox Live has expanded to offer a lot more -- namely streaming video, streaming music, and video chat. As the number of extras has grown, the price of Xbox Live Gold has also increased from $50 per year to $60 per year. It's worth noting deals can be had throughout the year on one-year Live subscriptions for roughly $35, so it's not as if you're necessarily paying the price of a new game for Live. Still, $35 is nothing to scoff at, and it's a lot of money to pay when my needs can be taken care of elsewhere for free.

Sony's PlayStation Network offers similar functionality without any kind of accompanying fee. It's been argued ad nauseum whether PSN is as good as Xbox Live; it may lack features like cross-game voice chat that I appreciate on Live, but the bottom line is it offers the ability to play games online for free. It also provides access to the one streaming video service I care about most on my Xbox 360 -- Netflix -- without asking me to pay an additional fee on top of the Netflix subscription I'm already paying for.

PSN does offer a subscription service in PlayStation Plus; the key difference between it and Live is that it's completely optional. It's nothing new, having been revealed at E3 two years ago. Like Xbox Live, its original feature set has been expanded over time; in Plus' case, it now features cloud game saves and full game trials to go along with discounts and free games. That's all well and good, but it was an announcement during Sony's E3 press briefing last week that makes a subscription all the more tempting. A selection of full games -- not downloadable games, as are usually offered to Plus members, but full retail games -- can now be downloaded by Plus members and kept for as long as their subscription is active. The dozen games available this month are mostly older titles, but there are some really good games in there including Just Cause 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Infamous 2, Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, and Saints Row 2. This is all included in the $50 per year fee you pay for Plus.

 

I was initially underwhelmed with the free games announcement, as rumors were swirling that Sony might announce a cloud gaming deal at E3. When something to do with that wasn't announced as a Plus feature, I felt Sony had failed to offer a killer new reason to subscribe to Plus. Upon further reflection, the free games are a solid offering on top of everything Plus already had. The cynics can say this is nothing more than a way of gaining access to titles people didn't feel strongly enough about to buy when they were first released; my counter would be to ask who can buy every game worth playing these days. This is a nice opportunity to catch up on some quality titles you may have missed the first time around, and it's something completely absent from Xbox Live.

Why I bring this up is because, for a similar amount of money as I pay for Xbox Live, I can get the core functionality of what I need -- online gaming and Netflix streaming -- in addition to a variety of free games and discounts on others. Microsoft can run down the list of other features I can only get on Xbox Live, like Twitter or Last.fm or demos (locked away to Gold members when any PSN member can often get them for free) or any number of other entertainment options, but the reality of the matter is I rarely make use of any of them. I play games online, I watch Netflix, and that's about it. There is also the issue of advertisements -- the Xbox Live dashboard is littered with them despite my Xbox Live subscription. The PlayStation 3's XMB, while less attractive in my opinion, is free of ads for things I couldn't care less about.

Having said all of this, it's not as easy to cut the cord with Xbox Live as I would like. Multiplatform single-player games would be easy to start playing on PS3 (or, better yet, PC), as Achievements don't matter to me like they once did. What isn't so easy is dealing with other games. As far as exclusives go, Halo 4 is one of my most anticipated games of the year and I know I'm going to want to play it online. Multiplatform multiplayer games are something I've almost always purchased on 360 because that's where my friends are. Like trying to get into a new MMO and losing interest because my friends are still playing World of Warcraft, the idea of leaving behind my many friends on Live for the few I have on PSN is not an enticing one.

I understand the rationale for why Microsoft continues to charge for Live -- if it can get away with it, there is no good reason to give up that enormous revenue stream if hardware sales are doing well. I also get why features like Netflix, ESPN, and company are kept exclusive to Gold members; were those features suddenly made free, you can bet I would not be the only one questioning what it is I'm paying for. It's also not difficult to imagine Xbox Live subscriptions being used as the basis for a subsidized version of Microsoft's next console, something the company is currently experimenting with, no doubt with the intention of taking things a step further with the so-called Xbox 720.

None of these business realities makes me any more interested in paying for Gold, though. Once I've had my fill of Halo 4 and my subscription runs out early next year, I can certainly see myself dumping Live after a nine- or ten-year run, at least until the 360's successor comes along. And if that, too, ends up featuring a dashboard slathered in advertising and offering no compelling reason for me to pay for a subscription while the competition is giving me free games for that same money, I might never come back.