I honestly don't see how people can justify paying for it when every equivalent service on consoles and PC is free. I know it's not a lot but the principle of it is just wrong. I think the main 2 reasons people pay are:

1. If you want to play online you have to

2. If all your friends are on X-box Live and you don't want to be left out of future games

What exactly is party chat and cross game chat? I always wondered that.

I don't have LIVE and when I did I never used them, but if I were to have to guess I would say that Party Chat would be you and a bunch f your friends all being interconnected and talking to each other at the same time.

Cross Game chat is me being able to talk to you with a microphone while you play Skyrim and I play Castle Crashers.

lol at only two exclusives. none of which even sound appealing.

Yes cause your opinion = everyone's opinoin right? RIGHT? BTW learn to count.

I wouldn't say it's special as such but what makes it good is the tight level of integration between community/games/content it offers. In truth cross game chat is the only real USP it has functionally vs PSN so far as I can tell - but the OS for the console and how it integrates is a bit better and slicker. Online play itself is identical. Downloads and patching is neater with Live though.

It's also not really that expensive - although I think Silver should get access to more than they do in terms of non-gaming non MS centric stuff.

Is this one of those "make me feel better about my decision" threads? I can't help you with that if you are talking about XBL since it's hardly worth it these days if at all but a lot of people are trapped in it. I don't consider cross game chat to be a worthwhile enough feature to pay for the service, though a lot of people here know my distaste about paying for such lackluster service already. You should also keep this kind of threads in the MS forums where it's more 360 friendly instead of the Gaming Discussion section, just my advice. I'd just stay silver and pick up a PS3 or game on PC in a home environment for online personally.

Money is still money man, it's always better to save if you have other cheaper alternative options unless you are a sports star or something.

There;s really nothing 'special' about it. I mean, sure, it can be worth the money if you're hardcore into online play and all your friends have it, but it's really not worth it.

My PC can do everything my Xbox can do, but free of charge.

The basic PSN network gives me equal play (though less chat features) free of charge.

The Wii online sucks but it's free, too.

I just can't justify paying the price of a game to use a service I not only don't need, but would rarely use since I don't play much multiplayer. I enjoy singleplayer experiences much more than listening to obnoxious, ignorant, racist 13 year olds any day. Once my friends all got PS3's and ditched the 360, life got much better for me. Even when I DID play online, I only ever played with friends, never EVER with randoms. Ever. I ended up muting 75% of the people I ever played with, which is unacceptable.

Honestly it's just not worth it. I like me some X-box, don't get me wrong, but I refuse to pay 60 bucks a year just to play multiplayer when I could easily use that money on a whole new game or buy Call of Duty on PS3 and play free of charge.

If anything, I find Steam much easier to use than XBL since I can get to things much faster, I don't have to goto the store, they show metacritic scores right there with trailers, pictures, description of the games, steam community forums that's one click away, and I can use a web browser lol.