Honestly the xbox is the only brand gaming could live without. They've done more harm than good ever since they came. The SCAM that is the "pay-to-play online" for starters...
You must be young...
Super Nintendo, SEGA Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, all cost much more than XBL, not to mention paying for long distance minutes. And that was for much less than you get with Xbox Live. Paying $60 per month for Xbox Live infrastructure, and server upkeep is much better than paying for the modem hardware to make your Super Mario Kart cartridge open up the online mode, then pay the 9.95 per month just to connect to another SNES without and server inbetween.
When I was in high school, many kids in my class were paying $21.95 per month for SEGAnet, and then some games required a payment on top of that to use other servers.
If you think Microsoft was a pioneer of charging for an online platform, your out of touch with reality. It may suck paying an extra $60/year, but not only is it much less than people were paying prior to XBLIVE, but it also adds a ton of features that we did not have with the more expensive prior online options.
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