Microsoft to increase price of Xbox Live Gold

[DirtyP2002]

Slimebeast said:

DirtyP2002 said:

I don't get this. MS said they had more than 25 million members back in April I think. Might be some more today.

And sources said more than 50% are gold members. So we have about 14 million paying users. So XBL fee revenue should be about 700 million USD every freaking year. That is money Sony or even Nintendo wished they had.

And to expand XBL to mobile phones you thought they would like to give it a broader appeal with prices for everyone. Sure they added content like ESPN, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Party chat etc etc. But 700 million USD should be enough money for these apps.

The ESPN deal might be pretty huge, but they need to expand the service even more.

And I am not even affected by this.

You aren't suggesting Microsoft is greedy, are you?

Hell no.

I am a Xbox Live Gold member for almost 7 years now. I paid 60€ on the original Xbox without any content except online gameplay. I would pay even more to be honest. The service is by far the best in the industry. Yes I tried PSN, Steam, Battle.net.

The thing that concerns me is what MS is doing with the money. The canceled Kin for example cost a lot of money and it even put the EDD in the red, even with the very profitable gaming business. So the fees I paid for Xbox Live financed a product I did not ask for.

Think about this insane number, 700 million USD every year. A big budget title cost up to 60 million. Literally, they could invest in 12 (after the increase) big budget titles every year. I think Gears of War 2 cost 20 million to develop. MS should commit themselves to invest 15% of the Xbox Live fees to satisfy the people they got the money from in the first place. That would be more than 105 million USD. Crytek's Kingdom, Remedy's Alan Wake are two examples for this. Spent more than 100 million every year on talented developers like Crytek, Epic, Remedy, Tri Ace even Insomniac and you are fine. With this money, it shouldn't be a problem to secure 2-3 big games a year. And as soon as MS makes such a statement, gamers would forgive them in a second.