| selnor said: People who have and use Live Gold regularly understand why it is a paid service. It really is leagues ahead of the comp in the online service. If it wasn't people wouldn't pay. |
Fallacious, because it has no real competition. Real competition would be an alternative set of online services allowing you similar results, among them playing online your 360 games.
If you love Halo 3 and want to play online you have no choice, but pay for live gold. So its intrinsic value might as well come from the fact that it unlocks the most beloved feature (network multiplayer) for the most beloved games on the platform.
If MS offered a live silver that included multiplayer, how much value would live gold have for most owners? A very reduced one, I suspect. Thus its value is mostly "borrowed" from the value of the software itself: unless you pay up each year, the software you bought is crippled in a variable degree, sometimes substantially.
This doesn't happen on other platforms, and as such it doesn't make sense to say that it's the quality of the online service that is selling it to the customers. It's simply a lock-in.
