If MP was free, would anyone pay for LIVE for the other features, and would 360s sell more?

[J_Allard]

Adinnieken said:

J_Allard said:

Party chat requires Gold and was always an XBL feature. Whether or not some other console came out years later and added it is irrelevant to the question asked in the thread.

Well, no it wasn't.  Party Chat was a featured added to Xbox LIVE with the original Xbox a year or two after XBL was launched, then disappeared with the Xbox 360.  It later reappeared two years later on the Xbox 360 with either the Spring or Fall 2007 update.

There was a big kerfuffle about it missing from the service with the launch of the Xbox 360.

Actually the original XBL had a 16 player "Voice Chat" section but that was all you could do. Unless they drastically changed it since last time I used it, you couldn't play games or do anything else on the console while in Voice Chat. And generally, more than 5-6 other people made it pretty laggy. Not the same thing as Party Chat. But anyway, I didn't literally mean Party Chat has always been an XBL feature as in its been there every day the service has been up, I meant more in the sense that since it's been around, it's always been treated like a key XBLG feature.