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..
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
that cracked me up... u made my day