This is why Xbox Live is worth the money...

this is the flaw with the argument

"worth it" it entirely based on the individual. if im bringing in 100 grand per year, and i like it - then yes its worth it because it really enhances my xbox experience, which i spend a lot of my time doing.

if you are living on scraps barely getting by, than it's probably not the best investment.

so yes, there is no point in arguing about it.

[QUOTE="skrat_01"]Stop trying to justify the price tag to yourself. Accept that you are being rippoed off by microsoft, however the service in its own merits is good. - Its a ripoff, and always will be. Paying to gain acess to game content you already paid for IS that. Put any price tag on it, and its a ripoff, like it or not.UnnDunn

More like, why would this compagnie of car charge for gas while the other doesn't?

your not paying for dedicated servers PER GAME, but MS does use a lot of dedicated servers for many of their features. for the 9000 voice emails stored in my inbox that are not stored on my xbox 360. for millions of extremely detailed profiles, the ability to have millions of people talking to each other cross game, cross movie cross demo at the same time, the ability to download a 1.5gb demo in 7 minutes etc.

the point is, many xbox features cost microsoft money and require a lot of maintenance; they already lose money every console so it's not crazy for them to charge us. they're just making a % of every game.

like you said, it's not a NECESSITY- but it's nice to have. why do people pay nearly twice as much for an apple computer? it does the same thing people just want the premium and clearly have some disposable income.

BobSacamento

Profile hosting pays for itself, from the Royalties and advertising - the first which is huge on Live.

Why else does GS not charge us for profile, message, blog and video hosting? Because they get enough from advertising, due to web traffic.

Maintenance pays for itself, as does hosting - hell I know so, a close relative of mine managed an ISP for 10 years....

Of course the fact that you primarily pay to get access to online content of your games, pretty much ruins any 'its premium' argument.

Because even with an Apple computer you buy it, and you can use it without paying extra fees for its other capabilities.

PC does it better, more advanced, and free.crazy-player

this is the flaw with the argument

"worth it" it entirely based on the individual. if im bringing in 100 grand per year, and i like it - then yes its worth it because it really enhances my xbox experience, which i spend a lot of my time doing.

if you are living on scraps barely getting by, than it's probably not the best investment.

so yes, there is no point in arguing about it.

BobSacamento

[QUOTE="UnnDunn"]

[QUOTE="skrat_01"]Stop trying to justify the price tag to yourself. Accept that you are being rippoed off by microsoft, however the service in its own merits is good. - Its a ripoff, and always will be. Paying to gain acess to game content you already paid for IS that. Put any price tag on it, and its a ripoff, like it or not.Bebi_vegeta

More like, why would this compagnie of car charge for gas while the other doesn't?

[QUOTE="BobSacamento"]this is the flaw with the argument

"worth it" it entirely based on the individual. if im bringing in 100 grand per year, and i like it - then yes its worth it because it really enhances my xbox experience, which i spend a lot of my time doing.

if you are living on scraps barely getting by, than it's probably not the best investment.

so yes, there is no point in arguing about it.

foxhound_fox

[QUOTE="crazy-player"]

[QUOTE="yoyo462001"]no Pc does not, XBL is far better than anything on the PC and this is coming from a PC gamer, Pc you need Vent or teamspeak in most instances.UnnDunn

On XBL EVERY game has voice. No Teamspeak required.

You are paying LIVE gold after paying the full game price, considering every game means about 20 of the 60-70$ of royalty for Microsoft already, for a bunch of master servers that even PC games that stopped selling 5 years ago still have.

Wow, you gotta be kidding me... The voice communication on PC games is normally attached to the data transferred from clients to servers. HL and HL2 (and derivates) have it because the server handles it. In XBL you have what you have in MSN, you send your voice establishing a call to the players that are in the room or your friends with a voice compressing plugin. You are talking from your imaginary theory. If its not the case, post a link that backs you up.

You are paying LIVE gold after paying the full game price, considering every game means about 20 of the 60-70$ of royalty for Microsoft already, for a bunch of master servers that even PC games that stopped selling 5 years ago still have.

blitzcloud

On PC, voice is handled one of three ways:

1. Some games, such as UT3, support voice internally, and it is enabled or disabled depending on the server you join. The pros for this method are that the game can control who hears your voice and how they hear it; it can automatically do things like team-only voice, or location-based voice. The cons are that the developer has to expend time, effort and money engineering the voice support, and some games do it better than others. And of course, the vast majority of games don't support voice internally at all.
2. Game launcher clients like Steam, GameSpy Comrade and Xfirecan provide voice support in a fairly easy way. The pros for this are that it's fairly easy to get going and the same method works across a wide variety of games... you and your friends just join the same in-client game room and then connect to the game server. The cons for this are that Steam/Xfire/etc. don't know what's going on inside the game, so if the teams change or the players in the chatroom get separated across different game servers, consistency is lost and confusion results, as the players in the chatroom are not seeing the same things in the game. And if someone joins the server, they have to join the chat room separately or they won't know what's going on. The Valve games are an exception to this; since they're tightly integrated with Steam, they can control who hears what and make sure everything stays consistent when using Steam to do voice chat.
3. Third-party clients like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo offer generic voice chat, but are designed to be highly efficient and keyboard-friendly so as to work in the background. These clients are super flexible, quite powerful and support any application (not just games) that might require voice chat. But the cons are the same as with the game launchers; they have no idea what the game is doing, so it's up to the players/chatters to make sure the right people can voice chat together at the right times. In addition, these clients are complicated to use and require someone to pay for a server (for good performance).

On Xbox Live, voice is handled bythe Xbox Live APIs. Whenever a new game session is started, XBL will automatically put all the players in the session into the same "chatroom" and begin exchanging voice packets among them. But the game can tell XBL to selectively mute/unmute certain players, or send certain audio only to certain other players. The game can also perform effects on incoming voice transmissions; route them to speakers/headphones, apply dynamic effects or place them on the 2D soundstage. This means that while XBL handles tx/rx of the actual voice packets, the game can still control who hears whom and how. This link offers a simple overview of how games can programmatically control and monitor voice chat sessions.

This means XBL's voice implementation has all of the advantages of the various PC voice systems, with none of the drawbacks. There is no other system like it.

Your assertion about Live in general is off-base. XBL is far more than "a bunch of master servers."

[QUOTE="Bebi_vegeta"]

[QUOTE="UnnDunn"]By that logic, gasoline should be free. After all, why do you have to pay more just to use the car you already paid for?

UnnDunn

More like, why would this compagnie of car charge for gas while the other doesn't?

Some cars... you mean 0.0000000000001%???

BTW, that's your logic and yes playing online should be free.

xbl is a rip off.

My take on it is this:

Xbox Live is an excellent system with nice features and is the best in console online. However, I wish that basic online play was free as I do not play/use online enough to shell out $50.

2. You're not making any sense. How will I get seperated and confused from the people in my vent/whatever when they're my friends/ringers and will tell me what they're doing. You really don't need to have people in a random pub in the same voice chat system all the time anyway, calling strats in pubs isn't important.

3. Again, if we're doing something important(scrim, raid. arena, etc) we will be in our vents/chat systems talking to each other. Other stuff isn't important and vent isn't needed. It's not hard to do either. If you don't have a vent, use skype it sounds pretty much identical and is free.

thefsmlol

Xbox Live makes it all universal, seamless, automatic and foolproof. It doesn't matter if you're doing a raid or if you're just chillaxing on a pub; you get the same high-quality voice support. Some of my best nights on XBL have been spent playing Texas Hold'Em, just talking about whatever, making friends. You can't do that when you have to exchange skype/vent/TS info every time someone joins. And it's not the same when nobody is talking (eg. on PokerStars.)