Just throwing this out there, but as a PS3 fanboy and not using much of Live I will say that for what you do get in Gold is worth 60 dollars (70 now?). Now what I'm going to talk about , I have no idea if it's available for silver or not, but the ability to download my profile to any 360 with all my games, to be able to download my saves to any 360 and keep up cloud storage, demos, videos, etc, match making, cross game catch etc, is worth the 60 dollars you spend and that alone makes it worth the money. Now they added ESPN and other stuff (I'm not including facebook integration or anything like that cause let's be frank, use a PC or your PS3's web browser. Hell your mobile phone would probably be better to use) and they raised the price of Live and that is worth it for the extras. Now here's where the counter argument comes into play; game hosts. That's the most crucial part of gold, playing games online. You can cut all that crap out and the most important thing is playing games. Here's the argument against Live; games have become peer to peer and you're now paying money to use your bandwidth that you're already paying for to host a game. That to me is fail and you can't argue against that cause now Microsoft is charging you to use something that costs you money. It's like paying for the air you breath, it's ludicrus. Now before on the X-box all games had access to dedicated servers and it's all gone now, and I personally feel anyone paying for Live to just play games is essentially having their money stolen by Microsoft. And that is personally why I refuse to pay for Live. Now with that out of the way the overall service is very good, integrated well, and has a lot of features and Microsoft was ahead of the game with its cloud storage of profiles and such (Though Steam might be able to match it, though I don't use steam much to see if it works as well). On another note: as far as I know the price is going up here in Canada and we're getting none of the features that have driven up the costs (ESPN and probably other things, though I'm sure the ESPN deal was the major cost increase). To sum up is Live better than PSN? Of course it is, it's quite better and is worth every penny. But on the other hand if I only want to play games with my friends, the core of the service, it's a huge ripoff; why? Cause Microsoft is paying for nothing outside of their match making servers and cross game chat. Now I put this idea foward: turn Gold into a core account charge the minimum to run cross game chat and match making servers, and add on a small price hike for a profit. Move all that extra non-game related stuff and the extra game related stuff (cloud storage) and put that into a platinum and charge whatever the hell they want. If I had people playing on the 360 only that I want to play with; I'll gladly pay a smaller fee for just the core service of match making and cross game chat, kinda like what Sony did (PSN regular for gaming is gaming only and free, everything else extra you don't care about is on a fee, if you want it then go right ahead and pay for it). Now can we stop having these threads? There's a bajillion of these in the forums already going over these points.
