You gotta hand it to the Live haters, which tend to be Sony fans.....they stick to their principles.

Sony, to date, has had 0 reason to make any announcement regarding the success/subscribers of PS Plus. Guess PS fans are literally against spending money for online, period.

It's such a small amount to pay I don't give it though so yeah I'll probably pay for XBL Gold next gen. Would I like it to be free? Sure I would, I wish everything was free. But it's not and it's cheap so I pay for it.

Question

 I'm not really familiar with Xbox Live if im honest but as far as I understand it cross game chat is a major attraction of this service, often used to highlight PSN's "inferiority".

It never happened on the PS3 because of hardware (ram) limitations as we know. But with PS4 most likely being able to support it, won't LIVE lose a major reason to charge people money ?

(As long as such a capability is not a PSN plus only thing)

I think there will be multiple tiers for XBL rather than just Silver and Gold i.e. "free" and "pay to play" next gen. I think there will be the Silver / "free" version, which may include certain apps, then the next tier up, akin to the current Gold will feature online multiplayer and access to other apps, and then I believe there will be something like a "Platinum" tier that will include premium subscriptions to certain TV and multimedia apps and perhaps some added benefits (fingers crossed).

well ?

 it's an honest question, im not trying to start some flame war, i really have little expericence with Xbox live

 if PS4 has "cross game chat" capabilities (which it most likely will) won't LIVE lose a major exclusive feature (that MS charges people money for) ?

Sure they will lose the bragging rights, but their fans (as many of them have stated in this thread) will still pay for it even if the price was to be raised.

heh heh. This thread has skewed a bit out of control. There are two ways MS could go with online subs (as some have already mentioned) - either make it free or have some sort of paying system either yearly or monthly. I suspect they will go with paying subscriptions though it will be interesting to see how well this works. I think people pay for the online multiplayer capabilities now and get access to other apps as a bonus (if you want to look at it that way) - that is if you have already paid for that app. I am not sure how successful they will be if they have different plans just for the apps - would people pay for this if they arent already paying for online MP?

Guess we will see.

I PERSONALLY, won't be paying anything for it, since I'm getting a PS4 and off the Microsoft teet. I am so past paying to play online. I did it for a decade, and I'm done.

tbh most of the commotion about party chat/cross game chat is started by people trying to point out how XBLG is not worth the money, not by people who actually use the service. Sure, you'll see it in lists people make when asked why XBLG is better, but haters put the feature on a pedestal, not XBLG users. So yeah, technically MS would be losing a feature to PSN that was formerly excusive between the platforms. But it would do little to sway most people who pay for the service.

We pay because it's better. The possibility of Sony matching a feature is very high. The likelihood that said feature will work as well as it does on XBL.. not so much. A good example I have been experiencing the last few days is Guardians of Middle Earth. I have had the game since launch on both platforms but now that it's free on PS+, a couple of my little brothers have it and we play online. We use voice chat and it's terrible. I can say something and sometimes it it 20 seconds before I hear myself talking to them. And the same back. But on XBL it isn't an issue, the voice chat works great there. And even if it were an issue there, we could just use the party chat.

It's less about PSN matching XBLG feature for feature, more about PSN catching up the XBLG in performance and ease of use.

Yeah they have to fix the chat on all levels, I got that.