A few things currently.

I won't pay for online gaming. (shush, I won't talk about making sacrifices to pay for peer to peer gaming) I CAN pay for it, I just refuse to.

Cost of the machine, as of right now theres about 4 titles that I NEED an xbox for. If they can get an HDMI box with a tiny hard-drive for updates on the market for 199$ I'd bite :P But that's the most I'll pay for a secondary machine.

As mentioned above, not quite enough exclusives to warrant the purchase. Fable 2 will be a major help in that department... but as it stands now I have little need for one :x

The PS3 is my media player of choice, and as such will be the current center of the entertainment system. But I would like a 360 as a secondary unit (the wii needs more games that interest me :( )

^^Agree to disagree. I find the Live service incredibly beneficial. Valve is just now implementing features that Live has had since it came out. You find it ridiculous to pay, I find it reasonable. Engineers and infrastructure costs money, that is why MMOs make you pay monthly, and for only one game, and you also have to pay $50 for the game. Dedicated servers are good for some things, but Bungie has stated why they would rather have p2p online and I seem to agree with their viewpoint. To play WoW for a year it is like $150. Why not make them free? Because developers and engineers need to get paid and where do you suppose that money comes from. If Microsoft were to use the money from games for infrastructure, developers, and engineers then they would either have to use less staff or cut into their profits. This is probably the reason why Home is taking so long to come out. They do not want to put too many people on the project because there is no real profit associated with it. Even Hondas and Toyotas breakdown, but they do tend to have excellent warranties with their cars. Warranties are the only guarantees associated with buying a car and even then it can be a hassle. People pay for satellite radio, people pay for more channels, people will pay for services they want, and I want Live AND I already play games on pc. It is not an exclusive thing. One can enjoy pc online gaming and enjoy playing on Live. They are two completely different beasts.

And you would pick a car based on free radio? Interesting.

He's probably referring to the stereo, not the car. Then again, people pay subscription services for Sirius satellite radio (and Sirius enabled stereos) which is considerably better than standard broadcast radio for many.

Maybe not the best analogy. Instead if XM satellite radio was hypothetically a free service, and Sirius was not, the only reason to pay for Sirius would be if it had specific channels you as a listener were willing to pay for.

It's the same argument many two or three console owners are making, even if they supposedly only make up 2-5% of the entire console market according to that recent study.

If someone has a PS3 and play online, they have a PSN account. Free account for the most fundamental reason for having an online console: to play online. The only reason they would also be paying for their XBL account is if they were either buying all their games for the 360, or all their friends were on XBL. Otherwise it's like paying for milk when you already own a cow.

If the $50 were really nothing, MS wouldn't be charging for it. But it means less to the typical subscriber than it does for MS, which uses those revenues to add to their bottom line, much like the junk food and fast food ads in Dashboard, which are arguably more annoying than any service fees.

I keep my 360 unplugged from the net and only connect it for updates or when I want to download demos/games for that very reason.

hahaha its problems (not just RRoD) are anything but the past!!

I just had one friend get RRoD a couple weeks ago, and another friend of mine get some disk read error thing. Thats two more broken 360's needing repaired. I've yet to hear of one of my friends PS3's breaking.

here is what will make me buy a 360:

• black color at no extra price
• bigger hardrive
• $300 price for premium
• free XBL

It hasn't hit my price point yet which is probably $149-199, which is roughly the same price point at which I might consider buying a Wii. I would definitely go for the 360 first though, Dead Rising, Mass Effect, and a couple of other games are calling my name.

 hmm.... should I say something about nintendo right here??? hmmm...

1. mario has been in over 75 games, hasn't he?

2. virtual console, wiiware

and MS isn't overcharging for online play, they are covering costs. And as long as live isn't shitty, i'm okay with that.

WTF??????

(sorry, couldn't help it)

It is just like the sales tax. A little from everybody adds up to a lot. And nice of you to glance over the main points of my post. I barely notice ads on Live, and I don't recall any fast food ads. Mostly it is advertisements of things you can download on the service, which, in my mind, is a good way to get the message out there. What are your thoughts on the cost of developers, engineers, and infrastructure?

And watch this...I have 5 friends who each had to get their PS3s fixed within the past 3 weeks because of dust. See how easy it is. All posts with contents like this are immediately, in my mind, bollocks.

And that's why it makes more sense for MS to keep their XBL price structuring as is. Only a minority of people paying for it are complaining. Others will just stop subscribing. Either way, at this point, MS has already established a working system that partially depends upon subscriptions fee revenues as a part of their bottom line.

I'm getting the impression you didn't read that very clearly since you only homed in on the text you bolded.

Developers, engineers, infrastructure are a part of the same bottom line. All companies have them including Nintendo and Sony, neither of which factor in service fees for online play as a part of their bottom line. This is really restating the obvious.

Burger King. They did the promos along with the Burger King video games. I also recall seeing them Fall 07. It really doesn't matter if they started displaying ads for Xbox edition Nike footwear. They make Dashboard look like a billboard, which would be fine if it were a web browser, but seeing as how its an enclosed system I find it distasteful.

You could make it a hundred friends who just had PS3s that inexplicably broke on them and it still wouldn't validate your claim, particularly since the OP had nothing to do with the reliability of the PS3 which is commonly known to be far greater than the 360.

Nobody is denying this.

The only reason for bringing up one anecdotal comparison is to validate your support of the 360 platform. In buying the hardware and games, I support the platform as well, but as it's far from being the only platform I use for gaming, I'm far less likely to overemphasize its merits in a cheerleader manner while taking a harder look at its shortcomings.