where did that come from? i htought theyd make it cheaper

Cheaper seems more likely since they know that Gold members aren't anywhere near as large in the general Xbox Live population as they want it to be. Ofcourse they don't want to attract too much people just yet since they would have to massively increase their service to substain 20-30 million of gold gamers. But for the next generation I can see them lowering the price if they are still set on conquering a larger marketshare.

Maybe when the Next Xbox comes out but not during the middle of a generation, that would be insane. If they raised to to $100 I think we'd see a lot of people switch to the much freer PSN.

if this happened (which I'm sure 95% wont) it would be around £70-80 in the UK. That's insane, that's the price of 2 games!

How so? Sony says PS3 will have a 10-year cycle, so that's six to seven more years. Saving 6 x 50 USD = 300 USD. And let's not forget about the money saved by not having to buy hdds and a network adapter at ridiculous prices.

On topic: Pachter is an idiot, why does anyone keep quoting him? By doing so, you lend credibility to his inane drivel. Just forget he ever existed and don't bring him up again.

That's just the reason why they need to cut Arcade price at the same time, they cut $20-30, XB360 entry price becomes dirt cheap, people swallow the bait and MS earns $20-30 more thanks to XBL increase the first year, after the greater revenue is $50/yr more than before. Also, selling more Arcades, and thanks to the recent crack down on non official storage, people eventually wanting to get DD will have to give some more money for MS approved disks. This way, giving a $30 cut now, MS can get in 5 years at least $220 more than before. Furthermore, should MS reckon it has to cut Arcade anyway, doing this way that cut would more than repay itself even without taking into account more royalties on games increasing the user base more than without the cut. And a lot of people clearly said they're ready to pay even more, so why not?

Edit @Damnyouall:

C'mon, let's admit it, we have a lot of fun commenting Pachter and Malstrom's lunacies, they get their clicks, we get our fun, and if we pretend we take them seriously we get double fun making fanboys get mad, if we bash their theories we get mad these analysts' fans so we get our double fun anyway, the only ones not getting any fun at all and getting mad, for one reason or another, are fanboys

They would be better off lowering it than raising it. If one year costed 100$ the ps3 will dominate 360 sales just for that reason alone.

The 360 would need at least Double the amount of units sold as the PS3 for this to become likely. If they do end up with a massive lead over the PS3 i would say its a done deal. Sorry Just the way i think MS works.

doubtful,  Ireally don't think the 360 will be double the PS3's sales. And even if it did, that would not mean MS would think they could get away with this. Raising the price of Live would doom the service and future 360 sales. they could lose a lot of customers for future consoles. Anybody who actually believes that the price of live will double is...well...not in their right mind.

The way I see it, if people are willing to pay $15-$20 a month to play a single exclusive online game such as WoW or whatever, why wouldn't there be a market for Microsoft to charge $10/month to play Halo online as well as all the other 360 games? I think Pachter's prediction seems reasonable, as $100 a year is actually cheaper than $10/month.