I pay for live mostly out of inertia. I signed up for live way back in the days of MechAssault and Crimson Skies for the Xbox 1, and the last time I tried to cancel my subscription, I got this huge runaround about how I could only cancel two days before the renewal date and it wasn't possible to do over the phone (but you couldn't do it online). I probably use xbox live about 10-20 hours per year, which is pretty pathetic. I did get quite a lot of use out of the service with Halo Reach, however. So it hasn't been totally wasted the past year or so. I'm not really fond of paying for a subscription service and having that service blast ads in my face every time I want to use it, so I'm not sure if I'll be keeping my sub up for very much longer.
Inertia's also a big factor for me; I've been playing and paying for Live pretty much consistently since the original Ghost Recon on the Xbox. It's been a long time.
I could never imagine living without Xbox Live. I play at least 50% of my gaming (and I game quite a lot) online, mostly FPS stuff.
Well I have another reason on why I won't pay for XBOX live. This system that I have stated to have played less than 30hours. Which is a black slim model with 260gb drive in it. I started it up yesterday, mainly to see if I could get a video to play on it that wouldn't play on my PS3. The video would not play and there was an update to be had. So I updated it. about 1min into the update the entire damn thing crashed. Red light in middle of the power button. I did my troubleshooting and determined the issue to be the hard drive. I'm going to attempt to get this resolved quickly with Microsoft. If they choose not to I'm taking a sledgehammer to it and filming it.
I'm sorry I'm not seeing how Live specifically is adding anything in this situation. You made a platform choice, so you have Live for a variety of reasons (I get that). That doesn't mean it adds anything in the case of Dark Souls over other platforms. Your situation can be replicated identically with two PS3s without having to pay for Live and you would get the same value from it without the additional cost. That may not be the case for other games you want to play with other players so Live brings value there, but in the specific context of Dark Souls it doesn't add anything to the experience. Maybe I'm missing something here, if I am please tell me what is gained by two people playing Dark Souls on a 360 over Live that they don't get by playing it on a PS3 or PC? The other player being your wife is immaterial, if anyone wants to play with anyone else (random or specific) on the 360 they need to pay for Live. You don't gain further value from Live because you can play with a specific person as all the platforms offer that possibility. I get that you already have 2 Xboxes so paying for Live enables you to play multiplayer with the specific person you want. I'm not however discussing Live in absence of the other consoles, it doesn't exist in a vacuum and the only meaningful comparison of the value of Live is comparing it to its competition which necessarily means discussing other platforms. In your case Live is a necessity for the multiplayer aspect of Dark Souls, as it is for all Dark Souls players on the 360, but you don't gain anything other platforms don't already have with Live. It's not a value add in this case it's an additional cost with no intrinsic functionality over other platforms. You wanting to play with a specific person who happens to be on Live is an extrinsic value since your wife isn't a feature of Live. I get the same extrinsic value playing UMvC3 with some buddies over PSN, I couldn't play with them on Xbox because they don't have one, and I don't have to pay any additional fees to do it.
The thread title is "Why I won't pay for Xbox Live". My post was "Why I pay for Xbox live, and why it's not a bad value for me". It does involve a number of sunk costs and extrinsic factors, just as most people's decisions do. It was not an argument per se, but rather a description. I'm not interested in further parsing it into Faux Rational Actor language for you, as my last reply should have made clear.
I'm saying that, based on your initial post, it is a bad value for you as the only example you presented was a game where you gain absolutely no intrinsic value from the service over it's competition yet still have to pay for it. Dark Souls is a terrible example for the value of the Live service.
It was an anecdote. Seeing how an Xbox is an essential part of Xbox Live, I think it has everything to do with it.
You are completely, 100%, incapable of determining whether this was a good value for him or not. That's before we move on to the part where he explains why it was a good value for him and then you substitute in your own criteria and say it objectively wasn't. Or perhaps I should say "where you subsitute in you own criteria in an attempt to claim it objectively wasn't a good value, but fail".
Then someone please tell me what intrinsic gain one gets from playing Dark Souls on an Xbox using Live that they don't get playing on PS3 or PC?
Well, for one thing, there's zero chance they'll interact with the TheTrunkDr online, so that's a pretty big plus.
I'm not willing to pay for XBox Live or the ridiculous console price premium for games. It'd be a nice feature, but I could just as easily buy a cord and hook my nerdulator to the TV if I wanted a stupid huge gaming experience. Oh shit. Oh shit I have to do that now.
Why do you feel like we need to tell you this thing? What, precisely, do you feel will happen when someone makes that argument? The value one derives from these things is relative.
Ha! Yes sir, they certainly have: cancelling their revenue stream is as difficult as possible without getting caught up in potentially more expensive lawsuits. It works on the XBox.
I'm not even talking about the cancelling thing--that, at least, I understand completely, even if I think it's really shady. I'm talking about something as simple as making it so that Microsoft accounts are not forever tied to email addresses that are no longer valid. If they are going to require that people use an email as their user name (especially if you then program Windows to treat that email as a valid account even if it's not the primary contact email on the account), then you would think that they would realize that they are going to need to offer users the ability to change it when needed. The system should never, ever lock the account to an email with no possible recourse for changing it, but that's exactly the situation that I am in right now.
