This blog doesn't stop you from being completely wrong. Only a very small selection of games on Live have dedicated servers.

WTF MS. If the Halo series was not my version of crack cocane, I would drop Live like a fat kid drops carrots. Seriously though, this pisses me off,  I mean it's only $10.00 a year...but seriously, we are in the middle of a recession, how do they think they won't see a drop in subscriptions when they reduce the value to customers. like this. FU Microsoft...FU for addicting me to the Halo franchise, and using it to make me whore out my money just so I can get my next fix!!!

Well, yeah, the one choice you don't get is to own a 360 and play Halo 3, etc. online for free.  But that's the decision you've gotta make.  I'm against a flat fee because I see it increasingly in layers, either for additional services or as developers want a piece of the pie (if the next CoD performs as expected then I finally expect to see Activision square up to MS and either demand a share of the profits or add an additional layer of cost).

I'm also against Live because I believe an advertising driven model plus other approaches could be used to render it cost effective for MS and free to the user and make it more attractive.

So I play online on PC and PS3.  In the end, you have to vote with your wallet.  I accept people pay and feel they should have the right to do so if they chose.  If enough people pay then fair enough, if enough don't then I guarantee MS would change the revenue model for Live to make it more palatable to gamers.

I kind of wished microsoft introduced another type of membership. I wish they had membership just for playing online and party chat for like $30-$40. Because honestly i dont care about last.fm (have an ipod), facebook (have a computer), twitter (have a computer), and ESPN (have cable). With all of these useless services thay should have introduced a platinum membership for $60 for people who actually use these services.

Wait, do XBL users PAY for Facebook??? So are they the origin of false rumours and chain letters about Facebook becoming a pay service?   :-S  :-@ 

No, facebook was added to the XBL experiance. The price of XBL did not go up to compensate for the add on, so basically it is free.

So if it was added for free, it's available also with Silver accounts.

The only reason why I have Xbox live is because I sometimes (about once a month) play a game online. This is just not worth it I realise. I don't use facebook (I just use my PC with a keyboard and all the ease of typing), I don't use the zune video marketplace (too expensive per movie), I don't use twitter (at all) and don't use any of the so called extra's!. 

Microsoft still can't justify why we have to pay to play online when you can play online on the PC and PS3 for free. And now they're asking even more money for it?! C'mon! There's no common sense in that.

I still have a gold account untill may 2011, after that, I'll just quit the gold account.

Except it isn't. Netflix is also not available for Silver accounts, despite the fact that it's a separate subscription independent of XBL.

HTML and Kerberos werent' enough? They just HAD to make also a proprietary version of the definition of free?