| hinch said: That doesn't change the fact that they could offer it for free, but don't. What have they invested in really? The Dash? Metro? More space for ads (jk) But seriously, MS must be making a fortune off Live and what do they do with it.. add more and more services that I don't want or need that has to be accessed through Gold (great). A lot of apps on PC had those features long before Xbox Live - Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Xfire, Steam etc. Hell, even Skype.. which (ironically) is now owned by MS is free. Its the basic principle, they get you to invest time and money into their service and tie you to it. Your friends will do the same and will have to deal with paying a small sum of money to talk/play with each other. To access your apps - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Love Film, Netflix you'll have to pay to access them. And now some of their competitors ofer similar services (for free), I just don't see Live as anything more than a cash grab. But hey, if you're happy with it I'm cool with that.. this is just me just giving my 2 pence. :) |
You're welcome to your opinion on Live, at least your not one of the blind hatred crowd. I started gaming on my 360 in 2006, since then some of the features I've seen added are:
Party Chat
3 Different dashboard revisions (each a huge improvement imo)
Addition of numerous non gaming apps (I use Sky Player and Netflix frequently)
Ability to install games on HDD resulting in quicker load times/quieter gaming
They've improved the reliability of the Live service, in particular most titles matchmaking is so much quicker than ever before
There are many, many other features they added (for free) which they could only have done through investing billions into R&D for the console.
On the subject of getting the features for free on PC, that my friend is easy to say now that you have Steam copying all the features of Live. When the 360 came out that wasn't the case, sure you could use a seperate application like Teamspeak but it was hardly idiot proof to setup when you had to balance quality versus bandwidth on lower quality broadband connections (or invest in a TS server). Live actually improved all other integrated gaming services which is surely a benefit for everyone?
