What makes it special? What makes Xbox Live worth it?

[Mr Puggsly]

deskpro2k3 said:

Jexy said:

deskpro2k3 said:
Live should be free. To play online should be free. Gaming is not suppose to be an expensive hobby. (IMO)

Lots of things in life should be free.  But they aren't.  Especially when it's good enough that people will pay for it.  To call a dime a day expensive though... the economy in your area must be rough. 

 

Hey i chose not to use LIVE, I'm like the OP, is $60 a year good enough to play online?

 

edit: It is my firm belief that MS makes enough to support LIVE with the use of ads.

I choose not to pay $60 dollars a year either. Its not unusual to see a discount on the web or at stores. Recently I paid $40 for a bundle package that included a year Gold subscription, head set, and keypad.

An infrastructure like Xbox Live can't be supported on ads a lone. Perhaps if they ran commercials before an online game began, but that would be a nuisance people would pay not to have.

Last I heard PSN was still running in the red, not sure if PSN Plus changed that. Either way, on the PS3 publishers on have operate their own servers which cost a lot of money (Demon's Souls was on the verge of having its servers shut down). On top of that Sony forces publishers to pay bandwidth fees to put stuff on the PSN Store. Which is why there is much less free content on PSN.

To the contrary, Xbox Live operates all the servers (except for EA). They also cover all the bandwidth fees for publishers which leads to more content on Live. Ultimately, we're paying for a service that cuts cost for publishers, offers more content, and allows Xbox 360 to actually thrive financially. Its really the opposite of PS3 and PSN.

If you pay $60 a year, that's only $5 a month. I paid $40 so its more like $3 a month for me. Xbox Live is my cheapest and most enjoyable entertainment expense.