Energy costs are going down quite quickly too for the same performance metric as hardware gets updated with the newer smaller chips.

LIVE costs nothing to operate, compared to what they bring in. I'd estimate that it's more like 50% of the fee that's pure profit. LIVE is a complete scam in my opinion, and I'll never pay for it.

I wouldn't say Live costs nothing to operate.

It's the best model for game developers, they love it because it costs them nothing to make their games online.

And people think Live is just P2P, their are servers involved for the content to be downloaded from and for linking the players together in games.

I'm no expert but Microsoft has had to delete some content from the marketplace because it is costing them too much to keep it there. So ofcourse Xbox Live costs money to keep up and running.

Nothing to operate, compared to what they bring in, of course.

@ whatever well given that it costs so much to operate this service as u put it . Then explain to me why do PSN users, continually make comparisons with XBL on quality of service if this sort of thing is such a huge [energy/capital intensive] undertaking.
I guess what i'm trying to say is how does the PSN expect to be even remotely comparable when their service is supposedly free, given " energy prices soaring, it will cost more & more to run the servers. I can see them losing money if they don't raise the price."

I've never said anything about the PSN one way or the other. Obviously Sony is losing money on the PSN.

My point was that if this was going to be such a big money maker, it should already be in full profit mode after 7 years. There is no way they are making hundreds of millions on this. Otherwise they would have made a lot more than 89 million dollars last quarter.

true...also wasn't meant to come off as a challenge to your post, just that the statement you made was relavant to the point i was making and the countless PSN vs Live threads.[highlighting how pointless they are]

so it cost u americans $20 for live so y do microsoft charge us brit nearly $80 !!!!!!!

@i love xbox360

Because you still pay for it at that price.

well if i dont pay i dont play!!!

i just want to no where the xtra $60 come from ????