as noted silver is free. if you don't use the Gold services, then you will drop it and get all of the silver services FREE. yeh.
As for the rest of us. It is the cost of one game per year for the premiere online and social gaming network. Big deal in the grand scheme. Obviously well worth it for millions upon millions of people.
Would we alll prefer it to be free? of course. That's not the way the world works though. When someone invests in a good idea and executes it better than anyone else, they can charge a fee for it (and god forbid) even profit from it. yeh again for capitalsim!
Well worth it, or the only choice?
I don't want anyone to be offended by this, but people are sheep. You couldn't charge a person a fee of several hundred dollars up front and say "here, you are now able to play online for a few years!". But if you feed them in increments, and say "oh, it's only a measly cost of a game every year, teehee" then they'll eat it up. It's not as hard to swallow.
The point is, "no big deal" is a crock of donkey poop. It is a big deal. I would MUCH rather have more money in my wallet to, you know, play an actual GAME instead of paying for a service that literally costs them pennies to run for each individual users.
It still baffles me that people are so willing to just throw away their hard earned money. It speaks volumes to how folks value their earnings now a days. I value my hard earned money, and I'm not just going to throw it away because some schmuck at MS decided they "could get away with it".
I think this price hike is a bait and switch, clear as day. Hundreds of thousands of new users who will JUMP at the opportunity to get Live for $40 a year, you know "because it's a steal" and then in the years to follow they'll be paying for services they probably don't even use!
Yea, I'll stick to SP games only on my 360, Live and die in a fire.
Corporations exist to make as much money as they can in any way that they can. Saying that it isn't right for a company to charge for something that people are obviously willing to pay for makes about as much sense to me as saying that it isn't right that lions chase and kill animals for food when gazelles can survive by eating grass.
So then folks should just sit back and be willing to accept price hikes? Have fun setting the price margins for games next year then! Microsoft lead the hike to $60, and I have no doubt that, "because they can" they'll hike it up to $70 next generation. You do realize that this will ultimately lead to a collapse right? The market will saturate to a point where there are millions upon millions of users who are 'fine' with what they have, and each generation will be harder and harder to 'start up' so to speak.
Point is, this kind of behavior is counter productive. The market won't be able to sustain itself if the prices keep rising for no reason at all. There isn't even a justification here to fall back on, no new hardware, new services, nothing. It's just small services that they provide, a connection from one peer to another. They're ripping folks off, and folks love it. Why? Because they simply aren't smart enough to know any better. Ugh...
