Gold membership will never be free, it'll piss off all the year long membership purchasers and the retailers that would have a stock of useless cards (don't get me started on the tree huggers) multiplayer on the other hand I'm almost certain WILL be free eventually, and i think i have a good idea when...
I believe when the next update hits and the New X-box experience goes live this fall, multiplayer will be freely available to those with Silver memberships. By then Sony would likely have caught up with most XBL's current features and MS will have to do something drastic to compete, adding multiplayer to silver accounts among some of the other benefits of the new live (8 person party independent of games is a biggy for me) would be more than enough. But Silver had multiplayer why would you pay for Gold?
I'll tell you why, cause that gold membership will stream you some Netflick movies (and i hope that by then they include the netflicks membership under the price of the Gold). It'll also get you in the hotseat in those gameshows and may net you some real prizes...besides the gameshows i think you'll probably see a lot more online tournaments in your favourite multiplayer games, where the price of admition is that gold tag. unfortunately they'll also likely keep that nasty practice of keeping hot demos Gold exclusive for a week (especially now that PSN kinda does that with Qore).
Personally i think if they throw in dedicated servers for the top 10 multiplayer games and possibly include some kind of light XNA club membership where you can help with peer review (ie play XNA games for free) it would be worth more then the price of admission.
With this plan MSN can still keep making a profit while while giving it's cheaper fanboys a response to "But PSN multiplayer is free" other than "Touche`"
thoughts? what would make it worth it for you?
P.S if someone's going to repost this in the forums or elsewhere that's cool, but please at least link back..
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that cracked me up... u made my day