Should XBL be FREE ?!

[Spindryer]

With Sony and Nintendo both offering an online service for FREE should Microsoft drop there charges? I mean how are they justifying ?40 a year from me if Sony and Nintendo can do it for free?

I agree i think XBL is more robust and has evolved more but its only a matter of time before the other companies catch up and then i would also imagine still be offering their service as standard for free.

Is XBL a rip off?

[IcemanLeigh]

What does it come down to?

As long as people are willing, and continue to pay it, then no they should not reduce their charge..

Dunno about you but I wont be cancelling my xbox live in protest any time soon.. Feel free to lead the way.

[Azure]

Done to death.

If you look at the features list point by point it ends up that you just pay for a gamerscore. Of course it ought to be free, the one real defense is that MS gives developers a decent set of tools to implement live. My response to that is "No game has good integration with XBL except halo 2, sod your ****ing tool library".

Dunno about you but I wont be cancelling my xbox live in protest any time soon..

That isn't quite the question, and you answered it from MS perspective don't you think?

[Renegade]

I don't know, I enjoyed the online implementation of Gears single player (multiplayer is still a sack of crap) and the implementation online of Test Drive Unlimited. And now Halo 3 is redefining everything all over again, with uploading videos, recording matches, easy matchmaking parties again etc etc.

My year of Gold cost me ?17, I really don't care. I've probably lost more than ?17 from my wallet this year in the street already. What's ?17? 6 pints of Staropramen a year?

[IcemanLeigh]

That isn't quite the question, and you answered it from MS perspective don't you think?

Well yes that is true. But when you look at it from the perspective that even with the charge, so many people are willing to pay it, then you have to take a look at it from MS perspective surely. I could list as many arguements for and against XBL being free as I wanted, but in the end that isn't what it comes down to. It's simply supply and demand.

Sony have made their online service free because almost everything on their marketplace costs a bomb to download. They have simply seen it as a way of getting another sony home shopping outlet into peoples houses.

[FiveOhOne]

?40 is reasonable in my opinion. Sure this is MS, but it takes resources to run XBL, and a yearly fee of ?40 isn't going to break the bank, and from my perspective ensures its longevity. I don't, for example agree with paying for Vista, since it's an over priced bag of balls.

[Renegade]

People actually pay 40 quid??

Woah.

Ebay.com (American Ebay). I got my 12 month for 34 dollars, free postage as it was an email with the code. Got it within 2 minutes, had a year of Live within 5 minutes. Easy, and cheap.

[FiveOhOne]

technically I haven't paid for live since '05, but if MS asked I would :p

[Mazzy]

Should it be ? yes, will it be ? no.

[quickshot89]

if you cant afford ?40 a year why do you play on a games console?

[Liam]

technically I haven't paid for live since '05, but if MS asked I would :p

How can you get XBL for free?

[FiveOhOne]

I'm special, but not special shooz special...

[Azure]

He probably does what Perry did.

Go to family BBQs, borrow a random persons CC and use that -l-o-l-.

Expired did it Jay?

[FiveOhOne]

aye, it did.

[Spindryer]

Dont get me wrong 40 quid for 12 months when I'm on the thing every night mostly is hardly anything BUT why is it acceptable for MS to continue charging that 40 quid when Sony and Nintendo do it for free.

I mean Jay you said that 40 quid is needed for XBL but in what respect? They us my ISP and they use my 360 as a server (public servers supplied by the Game developers) So what do they spend all that money on with XBL that Sony or Nintendo don't ?

$40 times how many XBL Gold users there are = i don't dare even imagine.

[FiveOhOne]

Point of presence servers (the ones that you log in), content servers -(where do you think all those arcade games live?), the bandwidth it takes to get the content to your ISP, support staff, network engineers, redundant hardware - There's a myriad of logistical costs involved with providing a distributed service such as Live. Microsoft also have to subsidise arcade titles, since they can't be deployed to any other platform.

Already pointed about by Leigh, Sony offset this with high costs of downloads, Nintendo are flogging content they already own, and which have since surpassed their development costs, thus making net income with which to subsidise their services.

Neither Sony or Nintendo's infrastructures are anywhere near the size of Live's, and until they start making serious cash from downloads, won't be.

[Spindryer]

Microsoft subsidise arcade titles ? I always thought them to be overpriced. How does the PC market work then as playing over the net for free ?

[carocat]

Well, I just extended my Xbl account with an expired credit card..... Let's see how long it lasts before they'll notice. ;)

[FiveOhOne]

Well, the majority of the time when Developer servers are involved, it's a case of factoring in the running costs of the online aspects of the games in the initial fiscal forecasting.

You can purchase servers to host games (Battlefield, MOH and the like) from, which whilst you may be playing on them for free, someone somewhere is footing the bill.

Anyway, if you're going to compare Live to a PC gaming set-up, then realistically Live is far more akin to the MMO games like WoW than a stand alone title, with the integrated community messaging, friends lists etc which the vast majority of have subscription charges too.

Logistics wise, if you're hosting a PC game for example, the the traffic just goes from ISP to backbone provider (who is paid by the ISPs) to the other ISP, any stat tracking is generally minimal XML traffic, which takes bugger all bandwidth, you have to combine your own tools like XFire and TeamSpeak to bring in aspects which Live has already taken care of..

Fair play if you think Live is over priced, with Sony/Nintendo's offerings I can see why. Don't get me wrong either, I'm not saying that the full 40 quid goes into Live's running costs, M$ are clearly going to be skimming a cut off the top, they're a business, you'd be extremely naive to think otherwise, but there are always costs involved with multiplayer gaming, sometimes they're passed on to you in the obvious ways such as subscriptions fees, other times they're hidden within costs of the games themselves or offset in a variety of other ways.

Personally I think the quality of the Live service justifies the cost, I wouldn't be here otherwise. It's your cash and your totally free to make your own decision on wether or not to give M$ your money at the end of the day.

[Spindryer]

I would much rather give them yours :P

[DerAngryScot]

People actually pay 40 quid??

Woah.

Ebay.com (American Ebay). I got my 12 month for 34 dollars, free postage as it was an email with the code. Got it within 2 minutes, had a year of Live within 5 minutes. Easy, and cheap.
I never thought the American Live cards would work over here.

[Renegade]

The points don't. The Live accounts do. Trust me.

[Zyber]

I would love to play live for free but i get a better quality of gaming from live than i do with any of my other gaming platforms. Voice chat, friends lists (this is big for me), updates for Live/dashboard etc.

I do believe they should make all the gamerpics and themes free as they are quite a rip off and i only really buy them if i have some free points at hand.

Nintendo do offer a nice platform for the wii, all be it limited at the moment as they don't have as much experience in the online market. The new channels you can download may not be that great, but they are offering them for free which is quite nice. Their collection of Virtual Console games (their version of the arcade) offer a wide selection of games for all preferences. Although i think they have a specailised department (like M$ do with BC updates) for these games as some come with updates to fix graphics etc and they are made specifically for PAL and NTSC regions which takes time. I think the time for a game to reach both sides of the ocean is about 2 weeks unless something goes wrong.

I've not had any experience with the PS3 so i can't comment on that but as far as the the question goes, I'm happy to pay this small price for a service which promises so much now and in the future.

[BIG D 04]

Is XBL a rip off?

No....."Oh you want more, Ok then"

It really isn't a rip off except I don't like them advertising Films on Xbox Live via those Ad Spaces on the Main Dashboard, not very keen on that Idea myself. Keep it strictly Gaming in my view.

Personally for a Paid Service, I don't think there should be any advertising.

[Spindryer]

Like the BBC then.... I wouldn't mind so much if they let u have a second account for free or at a cut price. Say every new account you make on that XBL u get a discount.


There could be fraud but im sure they could make it so only 1 of the accounts u have can be running at anyone time. Or can only run at the same time if there being used on the same 360??

[Innes]

in my eyes, they should either make xbl free or The downloads on the market place free.

[kurosaki7]

They should make gaming free, anything else a paid service. Its pathetic having to pay to play a game you have already bought to use alot of your own resources.

[Simm0ns]

XBL is so much better than Wii and PS3 that its worth ?40 a year. ?40 a year is **** all anyway.

I dont actually know for a fact that XBL is better than Wii and PS3 online, but I can make an educated guess based off such facts as:

PS2 online was so bad 90% of people didnt even know it existed.

PS3 doesnt have any good games that the 360 doesnt have, and even then some of them arent online on the PS3.

Wii only has ONE online game - Mario Football. We can all guess how worthwhile that will be.

XBox 360 has quality games such as Halo that wont be on PS3 and Wii.

Microsoft basically pwns Sony and Nintendo all over the place, especially online.

I will happily pay ?40 a year for XBL. Anyone who thinks its a rip off should stop their subscription and not have any fun.

Edit: I should say though - The 360 marketplace is a ****ING rip off sometimes.

[quickshot89]

40 quid is 1 game a year, if u cant afford that, why do you own a games console?

[Razor]

PS3 doesnt have any good games that the 360 doesnt have, and even then some of them arent online on the PS3.



Don't mean to piss on your parade but the 360 doesn't have Resistance Fall of man which is better than 99% of the games available for the 360 at the moment.


Xbox live is without a doubt a better service but I still feel a little part of me die inside when they take ?40 off of me.

[Azure]

Just boils down to consumer choice, I think they are a ****ing rip off. Use my bandwidth and my machine as a host, then give me adverts then extortionate and misrepresented downloads for a fee?

It isn't about the ?40 per se, rather the message that I send as a consumer when I just fork it over. I believe they are taking the piss and so I got rid of the lot.

[Bonzo]

40 quid is 1 game a year, if u cant afford that, why do you own a games console?
It extends the life of your games aswell, think of how many games you would have just traded in or they would have just gathered dust if their online multiplayer wasnt so addicting *cough* Halo 2 *cough*

[Azure]

That is true enough, online extends games, I believe however the premium cost of console games should cover that, at least for soley "online gaming" without the crap list they file off like "stat tracking, gamerscore, market place, private chat that hardly works..." - they can keep all that tbh...

I would probably compromise and get a 360 in the future if they included one years XBL with each console sale. I think thats fair enough.

[BlueHoopedMoose]

Think of the all the dicks you get on XBL when the service is 40 quid a year. Now, imagine how many more dicks there would be if the service was free...

Liking Azure's idea about one years free subscription - that is a complete no-brainer for M$ really.

[KH Torrance]

XBL gave free trials, and it basically led to the downfall of Halo 2 matchmaking, didn't it?
But I can't find the post you are responding to, so maybe I misunderstand something.

A subscription to World of Warcraft comes out at ?107.88 a year.
That's just for one game!

Makes ?40 seem not so bad. :)

[Azure]

XBL gave free trials, and it basically led to the downfall of Halo 2 matchmaking, didn't it?

Where does that fit into anything?

[sub]

Just boils down to consumer choice, I think they are a ****ing rip off. Use my bandwidth and my machine as a host

They don't use your machine as a host unless you choose to, Halo 2 is different in that it simply picks the person with the fastest connection to be the host, however you would be using most of the bandwidth anyway to play in the game as a player so whats the problem?

They aren't using your machine to seed Bittorrent style for the marketplace, that I would really be pissed about.

To me we aren't paying for online play persay, it's the Friendslist, the Marketplace, the Gamercard system, stat tracking, all the things that make Xbox Live what it is. Go and play on the PC and see how many of these wonderful things you get for free... next to none, and certainly nothing cross-game without resorting to code hacks and potentially game-crashing plugins. Yes I know of Xfire, but that aint exactly a supported service and is known to bring games to their knees.

I like the idea of a years subscription in the 360 box, although I do think 6 months would be a better choice.

And the thing is it is only ?40 a year, most folk pay that every month or so for a broadband connection and it's the cost of one game anyway. And you can get them for ?20 easily online, or trade in a few crappy games and bring the price down if you really must buy it from a brick and mortar store.

[Azure]

Gears of war used the 360 as a host. Same with GRAW right? You can't compete when there is someone with a ping of 0, well you can, but it just entails dumbing the game down.

Either way that's of no matter to me, you said you're happy to pay money for a friends list, I think it should be free - just depends who you are.

IME Teamspeak is just fine.

[sub]

Gears of war used the 360 as a host. Same with GRAW right? You can't compete when there is someone with a ping of 0, well you can, but it just entails dumbing the game down.

By the player's own choice though, say Jay sets up a server on Gears/GRAW/Vegas/just about every 360 game, it's by his own choosing, it's not MS forcing you to do it because they know other folk will setup servers under their own gamertag.

Teamspeak works reasonably well, but you have to pay for a Teamspeak server, which can easily run into ?40 a year, and then the actual game server to play on will be around ?20+ a month unless you host your own room but then you'll be limited in terms of player count quite severely. So it's not as free as PC gaming first appears.

[Renegade]

Considering that an edition of the Official Xbox 360 magazine is ?5.99, I like the fact that I paid ?17 for an entire year and get all the demos and videos that come with the magazine. The demos are worth the price alone, considering how much money they save me from buying shoddy games that I thought would be good. I like to try before I buy, and the demos give me that chance!

[Azure]

it's not MS forcing you to do it because they know other folk will setup servers under their own gamertag.

Semantics Sub. You cannot play a game without someone having a ping of 0 and the point is that for the money, MS themselves are not hosting, you don't get a choice if you want everyone to sit on a ping of 30-50 ;)

I do not think ?40 is a lot of money, I just don't want to pay for something I think should be [at its core at least] free.

[sub]

Semantics Sub. You cannot play a game without someone having a ping of 0 and the point is that for the money, MS themselves are not hosting, you don't get a choice if you want everyone to sit on a ping of 30-50 ;)

You can, although theres only a handful of games which support dedicated servers and not a lot of folk run them since you have to buy another 360, another copy of the game and another ?40 for a live account.

What I would love to see is MS allow developers to create dedicated server binaries in the same way as the PC developers do and allow folk to host on normal Windows/Linux servers in data centers, would certainly hit the lag nail on the head!

[KH Torrance]

Where does that fit into anything?

It fits into the post I replied to. :rolleyes:
The suggestion that we are given one year of XBL for free.

If it's after so many years of paying, like, a customer loyalty thing, then fair enough.
(Even though it would work out the same as just lowering the yearly price slightly.)

But like I said, I couldn't find the post where this was originally mentioned.
All I had to go on was Moose's reply.

[Azure]

It still doesnt fit into anything, and you would be replying to my post.

A modder is not going to risk a 12 month account if he has to pay for subsequent ones.

The reason modders were happy to wreck halo 2 is because the trials were short term, widely available and free that let them. Give them the proposition whereby they have to buy a new 360 or pay ?40 for another years worth of play and it wouldnt happen. The 2 are completely seperate. You response was to imply that a free one time bundled 12 month account would wreck XBL, this just isnt the case.

[KH Torrance]

I wasn't implying that. I just read Moose's post and replied to it. I missed the bit where you said about having the one year free bundled with a console. I actually like that idea. It makes more sense than giving one month free with each game, because you end up with a closer to 1:1 trial to player ratio, so there are fewer extra free trials to be abused.

[Renegade]

Dedicated servers would eventually be shut down. With the way Xbox Live works, we are free to play online until the end of our lives if we wanted to.

Take PES5 for instance - less than two years old, but the PS2 servers have shut down never to return (and even that wasn't hosted on the servers, each player hosted one half but you had to connect to servers to join eachother). You can't play it online. On the Xbox, you still can.

[Bonzo]

Azure has a good point, maybe they should give 1 year of XBL gold free with a purchase of a 360. Can't see why anyone has a problem with that i mean you can create something like 5 XBL *1 month free trial* accounts on any Xbox 360. So why don't they just scrap the 5 free trials and give the user a opportunity to have all the time transfered to one gamertag a 6 month/12 months free.
What is the point in having the 5 free accounts anyway why not have the option to use all the time on one account instead of creating 5 and basically wasting 5 gamertags - i mean it's not like your going to use them again.
I used all 5 free trial accounts on my previous 360 and my current 360 - i used them for playing Halo 2 and never used them again after the time on them ran out, it's not like im the only one but what a waste of gamertags tbh.

[BlueHoopedMoose]

I used all 5 free trial accounts on my previous 360 and my current 360 - i used them for playing Halo 2 and never used them again after the time on them ran out, it's not like im the only one but what a waste of gamertags tbh.

Why would you need 5 different accounts to play Halo 2?

[KH Torrance]

*cough* boosting *cough* ;)

[Renegade]

Because it meant that playing online was free.

I did the same - had my year account and then had about 30-40 2 month trials that I nicked from Choices, with about 6 or 7 on the go at any one time. Just so I could get on and play some low level so I didn't get cheated (I got up to a 35 sniper before I simply stopped playing due to cheats. It was nice to go back and play from 1-30's without being cheated every game) and didn't have to derank, and to get more games on PES5 because people started avoiding me when I got quite highly ranked.

[Bonzo]

Why would you need 5 different accounts to play Halo 2?
Well basically it was to play with my friends and get their level much higher than it should have been. I used one account for each month, after one ran out i just created another one. I still had my Bonzo UK account active at the same time, it was just more fun creating the new accounts where it's level was 1 on each matchmaking playlist. Ive done some 2 month free trial accounts aswell, but i got sick of having to sit on the phone for over an hour just to cancel the account every 2 months.

[Renegade]

but i got sick of having to sit on the phone for over an hour just to cancel the account every 2 months.

Xbox Live dashboard > account management > auto renewal off.

20 seconds on your old Xbox and it does it for you ;)

[Retro]

Xbox Live dashboard > account management > auto renewal off.

20 seconds on your old Xbox and it does it for you ;)

Are you able to do that on the 360?




Either way that's of no matter to me, you said you're happy to pay money for a friends list, I think it should be free - just depends who you are.


The amusing thing is, we don't pay for the FR, because Silvers get that for free.

I have no problems with paying ?40 for a decent service, but as many have suggested, being rewarded would be very nice. The gamertag I have now is the one I very first had on xbox , about 4-5 years old. ?240, I could buy another xbox for that.

[Bonzo]

Xbox Live dashboard > account management > auto renewal off.

20 seconds on your old Xbox and it does it for you ;)
I could never find it, people told me to do it but i could never find "auto renewal off" :(

[Chet Webley]

I did the same - had my year account and then had about 30-40 2 month trials that I nicked from Choices, with about 6 or 7 on the go at any one time. Just so I could get on and play some low level so I didn't get cheated.....

we believe you renegade, millions wouldn't, but we do ;)

[Renegade]

Well I seriously suck at everything apart from Sniping on Halo 2, so I wasn't boosting people I can tell you that!

Ah Bonzo, I remember now - set your account to renew as a monthly membership (so that if you forget to cancel it you don't get charged for a year), and then go to Xbox Live Account Management on the dashboard and cancel your account from that, the day before it expires and renews for you.

Retro - the 360 Live accounts become silver accounts when they run out. You set it up as a free gold trial and at the end of that period you still have your gamertag but as a silver account. It's automatic, you don't need to change any settings.

[Bonzo]

Ah Bonzo, I remember now - set your account to renew as a monthly membership (so that if you forget to cancel it you don't get charged for a year), and then go to Xbox Live Account Management on the dashboard and cancel your account from that, the day before it expires and renews for you.
I did that but it just comes up with a "try again later" error message :(

[Renegade]

Haha pwned. Works for me :P

[Wicked_Slim_Shady]

The only real expensive thing about XBL is the intial outlay of ?40.

But if you take into account how much you play over a year, and all the money you'll save by not buying XBox mags for the demos, it pays for itself 10 times over.

The only thing I wish they would reduce the price of:-

Cost of Gamertag change
Pics & Themes (as stated in a previous post, 150ms pts is TOO MUCH for a theme)
Maybe a price revision of maps & XBLA games.

But will Sony & Nintendo's version of LIVE compete against XBox Live? NO, I DONT THINK SO!!!!!

Especially when you could play on PS2 Online with a dial-up connection, Sony & Nintendo have a lot to learn before they can take on Microsoft when it comes to online gaming.