Yes, those are private servers though. There are still dedicated public servers that are completely free to play on (especially for the games you listed), and some clan members have free access to the clan server when not in use.

what it has to do? those that pay for private servers are willing to own a server and do whatever they want with them with a good connection. you still can host a server in your PC if you want, but choosing one or another doesn't mean you have to pay to play on other servers.

Why cant people just grasp that Steam is not a console product and end it with that? I used to play on Steam when I played PC games. I don't see how it is relevant to this, just to satisfy the void of PC fanatics who like to put down console games every chance they get.

Exactly. You have no rebuttal against steam itself and its advantages over a paid service, so you attack the platform instead of the issue.

PSN is good most of the time, but not as good as xbl in many ways. In terms of using either service to just jump online and play a game they're very similar though PSN gamers seem to be allergic to using headsets. There are dedicated servers for some PS3 games as well yet it's still free. So yes, XBL is the best of the console services so long as you don't mind paying for it, with some gold benefits adding nothing to the online gaming experience. Sounds like that's all you wanted to hear.

I think it would increase sales slightly, but not enough to be a major impact unless it came with a price cut. Live should have been free in the first place. It isn't worth the money in my eyes. It is a stellar service overall, but still not worth it.

It makes too much money for Microsoft to just get up and say, goodbye! Live makes the game division millions, and that helps with losses, and exclusivity deals. It would be one of the dumbest business moves I have ever seen if they did it though.

If Live became free, I would only use it to maybe play exclusive 360 demos, or if a JRPG has online.

Microsoft giving up their cash cow, never, they have millions on the gold subscription....now if things went belly up like live did on the PC, then Microsoft will have no option but make it free but that will never happen on the xbox since they have no competition on the same platform.

It's like they were advertising live Silver, which is free, until you realise that all the good stuff that people want is only available to gold members, in any case it's a nice trick to get people in because technically there not lieing, just playing word games.

Sad thing is when people get me with the word games, I always return the product and buy something else. So I would have just returned the Xbox if I didn't know what I was getting into.

You'd be surprised how often the most obvious truths tend to get overlooked or even argued by silly people who fail to recognize them.

If live was free the quality would suffer. Features would be skipped, and corners would be cut. I'd rather pay than have to deal with something like PSN or the Wii online service.

That's no true, the service level can be maintained and be free, all Microsoft needs todo is find another source of revenue to support live, like comercials, but I guess microsoft is fine charging customer and advertising to them at the same time, cuz for them 2 sources of revenue is better than one...but they should be careful as PSN is catching up and it's free.