Limited-time Xbox Live Gold price cut for Silver subscribers

"Sony's PSN crew just smiled."

At what? All the money they're NOT making off of their PSN members? My guess? The Xbox has more paying Live members than Sony has free PSN members.

Amazon has actually been selling the physical cards at that price point for quite a while now.

i hate split screen game or the idea of play a great game with only half my tv .so in short i will pay whatever price to be able to play the game online with anyone in the world as long as i don't have to play split screen .

I think MS is running into the basic problem that it is difficult through advertising to convince someone to pay more than they already think something is worth. And despite the number of commenters on joystiq explaining that Live is worth $50/year, a large number of people apparently don't think it is. And much like Sony can release all the press releases they want explaining that a PS3 is well worth $400 and not really convince many people, MS has found that the only surefire way to get someone who thinks Live Gold isn't worth $50/year to subscribe to Live Gold is to cut the price to try to find out what they think it is worth.

The main value of Live Gold is that all your friends are there. If MS cannot maintain such a dominance that the majority of your friends are on Live, you might all get together and buy games on Playstation instead. And that could be a huge revenue loss to them. They simply have to maintain so much dominance that playing games on any other platform doesn't make sense. Even if it means losing the Gold Live subscriptions fees.

And this is why playing online with your friends will be free on Xbox soon. Gold may not be free, Gold might have other advantages. But they can't afford to lose online players to other platforms.

Yeah, whereas game matching on Gears of War 2 is heaven.

Live has problems.
PSN has problems, probably a few more problems.

But you can play with your friends quite well in both of them. Assuming your friends are on the platform in question. And that's the key here.

The most common "haha in you face sony"-comeback is that you´re more than happy to pay for an ace feature. But my question is; Why whould it be okay for MS to charge you for an ace product, in this case Live? What does it do that so top notch? Why whould i go buy COD4 on the 360 and have to pay extra to play online, when i can just buy it for the PC and get the whole game for less.

I dont get that argument.

MS Singapore charge $88 for 12 months.

I see a lot of people using the logic that it's only $2.50 a month, it's so little why does it matter? It's this type of logic that allows people to charge for these type of services and then creates the defensive attitude when people ask why you would pay for them at all.

Saying it's only a little bit of money isn't a good enough reason. If you can't come up with a good reason, then you probably shouldn't be paying for the service. Of course, with the rampant fanboyism on the internet, it's probably next to impossible to get a non-biased comparison of the similar online capabilities made.

12+1 cards have been on sale all over the place lately. It really makes me wonder if MS is considering dropping the prices permanently.