No longer taking money from me! HAH! :P
Anyway! Hurrah! I'm finally not a gold member any more, and good riddance! The more I look into it, I wonder why on earth I gave Microsoft free money for something that I didn't use! I thought the whole idea with XBox Live was to be a way to play games online with mates and have a good time, to discover that my mates weren't playing that same games I did, they weren't online at the same time I was, and that I was playing way more single player games than online multiplayer games. Then comes to the whole fact that I built myself a gaming PC, discovering that I can play games that look even better than my XBox 360, and I didn't have to pay for online play! Winner Winner Chicken Dinner... All this made me decide that XBox Live is simply not worth it at all, after all why do Wii, PS3 and PC users get free online play? Well... People playing MMOs like World of Warcraft have to pay a subscription to play that game, it's not a subscription to play any game on PC.
Microsoft throws out a bunch of marketing stuff like "You can chat to your friends whilst playing games!", this where things do "Pete Tong...", for those out there who have never played an XBox Live game online before there's usually 2 things that may happen if you throw yourself into a random game with people who you don't know.
- They're either obnoxious morons who spit out profanity, rasict and homophobic remarks to you...
- ...or everyone is scared of what might happen to what happens above that no one has their headset plugged in...
Pretty much it does rely on you to really play with friends who you know in the real world in order to enjoy it, but as I said above, if you/they can't get the time to play, it's almost not worth it...
What this turned out, was that Microsoft made a nice bit of free money from me, and I was a fool to do this for almost 4 years, not taking disadvantage of the service, and not finding the time to play online. People could say this is my fault, and I could take partial credit for that, but there are issues in Microsoft's marketing that needs to be ironed out.
First up, are the features that they lock out when you become a silver member, There's a Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm app that you can use on the Xbox 360 whilst you're on your couch. Thing is, stuff like Facebook and Twitter are a little silly to have on a games console, Last.fm on the other hand is a better idea! Now when the original Xbox was released in 2002, it introduced the ability to play MP3s in the back of your games, this of course was brought forward to the XBox 360, now yo'd think they'd incorporate Last.fm into the same feature... NOPE! you can only listen to music on Last.fm in the app only and not in the back of my games, suddenly these features that Microsoft promote, not only are they free to you on a PC, but totally useless on the XBox 360! So what's the point of having it there, and why only give access to this for paying subscribers!? Who's going to prevent me from bringing my netbook down to the living room and playing Last.fm on that as I play games on my Xbox 360? These so called "Key features" from Microsoft suddenly become a bit lame... Not to mention things like online chatting, which I can do with skype, and now with a better gaming PC, I can play games online for free, as long as I don't play World of Warcraft.
Microsoft needs a good long hard think about what they;re doing with this whole XBox Live thing, OK maintaining servers isn't cheap, but geez... They increased the price just after they removed the online play of Original Xbox games, such as Halo 2, you'd think removing that would cut down the amount of maintenance, they could have made the service cheaper! Maybe not... Still, I'm not upset about being a free silver member, I'm not going to throw away my money for something I'm not going to use, and to be honest, unless Microsoft offers a lot more band for my buck, then maybe... They should consider these ideas...
- Hire long term players to be "Buddies" that can play with you when your friend's are not around
- Remove server space for games that are clearly not going to be played, like previous year versions of sports games, Madan, FIFA, etc...
- Provide free-to-play on limited grounds services, such as have the ability to play the older original XBox live games online for free, but only with the people on your friends list.
So yeah, listen to me Microsoft, if you want my money, make the bucks worth it, otherwise there's no point!
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