Why Are You Paying More For Xbox Live? Microsoft Explains

Microsoft has just hiked up the price on Xbox Live subscriptions, as many of you already know. But there is a particular reason why they did: servers aren’t cheap. And because of the exclusive games presented on the system, a premium price must be placed. Craig Davison chatted with Gamasutra about the new increase, and explain Microsoft’s reasoning for raising the price of our subscriptions.

“As you can imagine, the costs associated with maintaining a service at that level and making sure all of those features are consistent, we’re hitting that quality bar, we’re adding the customer service infrastructure necessary, we’re accommodating all of the same social features and functionality too, there’s a cost,” he said. “Infrastructure costs, of course. And we’re continuing to bring more and more content.”

Davison was also approached about the free competition, and it was here he related a very controversial point of view. ”Now we get those Call of Duty map packs before anybody else does. We’ve got Gears and Halo, of course, as exclusives. We continue to get exclusives on the service as well. And we’ve gone from 400,000 members in our first year to 25 million.” Davison said.

Davison continued, bringing up examples of other services they offer, “So during that time, we’ve definitely got to fund it, and we want to add more and more and more. ESPN is a great example. No extra charge for Xbox Live Gold members. But we want to continue to bring that content in. We also want to continue to innovate on all dimensions, whether it’s social, entertainment, or gaming. So there you go.” There you go indeed.

The new rates are as follows: one month went from $7.99 to $9.99, three month $19.99 to $24.99, and 12 month $49.99 to $59.99 for the Gold subscriptions in the U.S. If you live in the UK, consider yourself lucky. The only change you’ll have to deal with is from £4.99 to £5.99.

[Source: EuroGamer]