By the way I don't understand how people can say that Blu-Ray is more important than online gaming... especially considering that many of the blockbuster games are best enjoyed while playing online.

IMO, these arguments always always boil down to: "Are YOU getting your moneys worth with a Gold subscription".

Xbox Live Gold is a good value for certain segment of the gaming population. These are the people who use the 360 as their primary console, and spend 20+ hours a week gaming online and who buy 2+ games/month. This is who Gold subscriptions are marketed towards, and these user are happy to pay it. It is a very small part of their gaming budget.

The Gold subscription is limiting to people who are the occasional gamer, or are buying the 360 as a secondary console, and sometimes want to play a game online or who want to occasionally use additional functionality that is free elsewhere. (netflix, facebook) They are paying the same for a Gold subscription, but not getting the same value as the gamer mentioned above.

I do not own a HD game console. I game on my PC/Wii/iPod/DS. I will probably eventually pick up a HD console as my 5th current gen device to play games on. It is hard for me to justify spending $50/year on a service that I will only occasionally use, and never being able to play games online is not a great option.

I wish the Silver offered more functionality so that I could get a 360, and not feel like a second class citizen for not paying paying $50/year. Maybe a limited number of online hours a month for free, with Gold being unlimited. Maybe with Natal and the push for more casual gamers, things will change.

MS is stuck with the problem of not being able to drop the fees, because they are making too much money off of them, and limiting their market outside of the hardcore console gamers who are happy paying for online.

great post!

If they're going to require you pay to play all your games online as they currently do, maybe they should actually make it a premium service? Dedicated servers would be an obvious start to this but there's so much MS could do to differentiate itself. But will MS throw a bone to silver users at this point? Highly unlikely. They will continue to add restrictions to make gold seem like a better deal than it really is.

Giving dedicated servers to Gold users and non-dedicated to Silver would require them to admit that they're providing a sub-standard online system right now, which many people are not aware of...

Actually pirates drive games to be better. It is shown 96% of pirates buy good games, even games already pirated. I download every game, if it's shit it is not getting a cent from me, if it's decent i'll support the makers. It drives devs believe it or not to strive for better games, and multiplayer aspect. Majority of pirated games you can not play multiplayer or it is extremely hard to set up an online server and modify to allow multiplayer community with it, unless you are playing lan it's just not that great, so pirates  buy games with a good multiplayer aspect as well.

So many people say things like "I don't pay for PC online gaming, why should I pay for it on my console?":
To those I say: Really? Subscription based games comprise the bulk of PC Gaming revenue these days -  a single game costing 3-4x an Xbox Live membership on top of the initial game sale. (and periodic expansions)

Not to mention, how much did your PC cost? Did you buy a $200 or $300 gaming PC? I doubt it. Console makers lose money on millions of consoles, and make it up elsewhere. Whoever you bought your PC from made a profit on it. There's a difference.

For those who claim it's a waste vs PSN:

Maybe Live is only a few extra bells and whistles over PSN right now, but for YEARS there was nothing like it on consoles, and until the past year or so it was leaps and bounds better than PSN. The overall gaming experience is still superior, and for someone in the US like me, about 1/2 to 1/3 of my friends have 360's and X-box Live, whereas I know only a few people with PS3s. Also, I use netflix streaming quite a bit, and not having to swap in a disc is nice.

And I totally don't understand how $30 a year (which you can get live for, noone has to pay $50) is a big deal to gamers who buy 10-20 games a year. Pretty much anything i buy, if there's an even slightly better version available for 2-3% more, I'll gladly spend the tiny bit extra. But for people spending $1000+ a year on games, $30 is a deal breaker? I'm primarily a PC gamer, and for just the few games a year I buy on console, Live is easily worth such a pittance.

Subscription gaming also exists on consoles, that's an entirely different matter. In that case you're paying for dedicated servers with storage, continued development of a game that you don't have another way to play. In XBL's case you're paying for none of that, just the puny matchmaking servers.

If I convert currencies, my gaming PC cost about $520 before tax... but I do much more with it than play games.

I agree with you that XBL has the advantage of a big userbase, of course that's important. Netflix, doesn't the PS3 also have it?

As for your last paragraph, see WiiStation360's post, that I agree with.

Let me clear up something real quick. Having dedicated servers or P2P is a choice of the developers. MS offers a matchmaking service alongside a ranking system in the form of TruSkill. They also offer leaderboard services across the platform. It is up to developers as to whether they want to use dedicated servers or not. L4D and L4D2 are examples of games that use dedicated servers. Forza 3 also uses dedicated servers and is first party. Hell, with XServer, external people can host dedicated servers for 360 games.

As for custom content, that is up to the developers and how they want to implement such a thing on consoles. Halo 3 took a step in a nice direction by allowing custom map variations and game types to be easily made and distributed through Live and Bungie.net. It is only a matter of time before the systems become a lot more involved in how they allow custom content to be created and shared.

The good thing about MS's matchmaking services are for developers to tap into an already developed and available system for online play. XNA developers can even tap into MS's scalable matchmaking services. No need for the developer to pay for their own servers.. Because of this need for scalability and accessibility available to ALL developers, there is no telling how many servers MS has on hand to maintain such a system. Not only that but there must be employees to handle any service availability issues, issues with particular games(such as the recent CoD MW2 glitch that MS is suspending people for exploiting), server maintenance, etc.

They are also now adding a few extra benefits for Gold members as well as online play. 1 vs 100(with more Primetime content sure to come based on its success), some new online services, game discounts, early access, etc.

Surely, the $4 a month it costs is more than the maintenance costs, but I find a ubiqutous set of services platform wide to be a compelling reason to partake of a Live Gold membership.

JaggedSac developers can have dedicated servers, but does Microsoft subsidize them? Or is it just the developer's expense without getting a share of the Live revenue? I'm not saying MS should pay for everything, but if they're collecting money for the online system they should be partly responsible for improving the online performance.