Alby_da_Wolf on 19 October 2009
Cutting Arcade 20$ and raising XBL to $100, besides increasing console sales, would give MS $30 more the first year the user owns the console and $50 more each successive year, so raising XBL and masking it with a small cut on HW makes sense.
As MS controls which services users can access, even those free accessing the net with anything different from MS stuff, it's cheap and easy to add features to justify the increase. If I were Ballmer, for example, to maximize direct and indirect benefits, I'd include Bing in the standard services and I'd make people pay a hefty extra fee to access Google.
