What previous price hike? The one that happened three years ago when memberships jumped from $49.99 to $59.99?

Yes. I loaded up on prepaid cards over the years when they were on sale and discounted, so I've not yet paid $60 and have been covered since before the price hike.

And you can still purchase prepaid cards as low as $29.99 depending on when Amazon, eBay, Groupon, Newegg, and countless others throw the memberships on discount. Just like before, one can have a membership paid for at least three years out...

If a person really sits down and does the math for cost of ownership for the two consoles over the full life of ownership, the differences are stark.

• Up front: $500 vs $400 ($460 with camera OPTION)
• Annual Subscription * ? years: $60 vs $50
• Subscriptions needed for family of 4 online gamers: 4 vs 2
• Free games from subscription: both but clear edge to Sony
• Peripherals from previous generation?: Headsets w/ $x adapter vs. Move, all headsets and most USB wheels/sticks

Also some differences for batteries and controller costs, but they are probably more or less a wash, and it looks like the market rate for both Live and Plus will be about $40.

This stuff isn't inconsequential.

But before I wasn't paying for PS+ at the same time. Even if I get Live subs for $30, that's $30 on top of $50.

I can't tell if your posts are serious or trolling at this point.

So MS has been knocking it out of the park and killing Sony by doing everything that was promised by Sony initially 2 months ago? Oh wow man, what a showstopper

This is precisely why an early lead this generation is going to be a big deal.

@Groucho. Need snarky new thread title. Recommend "Everything written in pencil" or "Making it up as we go"

Edit: That'll work!

For Sony, no news is good news. They don't need to generate press right now, and anything Microsoft says the media is already jumping on and bringing up the comparison to Sony, so they haven't needed to do anything. I don't think that's a bad thing at all for them, and I imagine we'll see some press and media in the next couple months anyway.

See below:

This is the deal. Keep two on the charger and run the one in the controller until it's dead. Dies mid-match? I'm up and running in less than :30 seconds.

ftfy

If you are really good, less than :05 seconds.

It may be a long time before I get Xbox One, so I'm still Exbox.

We will, however, stop egging Major Nelson's house. After we use up the last batch of eggs.

Actually, if playing on the same Xbox One, only one Gold Subscription is "needed." Anyone else that signs into that Xbox One has Gold capabilites.

It should be noted that, so far, MS has only committed to Games with Gold through December, so it's only a temporary feature for Gold subscriptions. On the positive side, the games given away with Gold are permanently the user's games, unlike PSN+ "fee" games which become inaccessible if the subscription ever lapses.

As for the newest reversal, it's definitely good news. One more thing I had a problem with. They have gone from a must buy console at any price 8 months ago to maybe sometime next year or at a price cut. Shocking turn of events.

As a company it still seems like they are stuck in "our shit doesn't stink" and "people will pay whatever for our system/Live" and "we're king of the hill" mode. All the reversals are just so they don't damage the brand. That to me is worse than them flopping on every policy they had planned for the X1.

To me there are still a lot of things wrong with the Xbox brand. The rising cost of Live now with 10x the ads it had a couple years ago. The lack of free games or true deals anymore. Everything behind the pay wall is utter crap. Lots of people tend to look the other way but Live is not the holy grail of gaming it once was.

Well, yeah, diving across the couch to the entertainment setup... :05 seconds.

I hate to say this, but the most truthful post in the last day has been from chess. Just follow the money. Yeah gamers, yeah Sony, the war, etc. but basically the preorder numbers are the ones forcing them to make all these changes.

They have been winning the console war for a long time, in the USA of course, that if they win the first year of the next gen consoles it may be almost game over.


Someone else said it a long time ago, a Sony console with Xbox Live infrastructure. Just do it.

Oh and I wanted to add my two cents to the controller discussion. Basically if you are a hard core gamer, you never run into an issue.

Xbox 360: 2 controllers (in each of my two consoles), all of them with eneloop rechargeable batteries. If one fails, just turn on the other and charge the batteries as soon you can.

PS3: two controllers. Same thing.

My only issue has been that I don't play too many games. I use my PS3 every day, but for Netflix and stuff like that, and I use the media remote. So I have run in the situation where my two controllers are without charge. At least my PS3 is close, so I can use a 6 feet cable.

Fair enough, I never had one of those charge stands mine was a plug in and play model that was pretty much identical to the PS3 except it felt super cheaply made (nudge and it'd stop charging)

Yeah, the charge cables were crap.

Exactly. Not sure where I saw it (CAG? here?) but someone put together a list of all the next gen FPS pre-order figures. The PS4 versions of those games were 15-20k higher than the X1 numbers. FPS is Microsoft's bread and butter. For a company who (as someone put it above)has been getting all the press all summer to lag that far behind the company staying silent is telling.

Same on PS4 except you can have your Plus profile on two consoles at once. Two people can play online on two different consoles on a single Plus account. So if you have 3 kids who all have their own consoles plus yourself, you'll only need two Plus accounts for the 4 of you.

If you only have one console, the two services are identical, except with PS4, you could conceivably split the cost of plus with a friend and activate your account on their PS4.

Appreciate the clarification though.

That seems like an extreme case, but you could still swing it with the Xbox One, since it allows the use on two consoles with one subscription: The "home" console for the account, and signed into another console with the account. So you could get away with 2 Gold subscriptions for 4 consoles, and everyone would be playing with their own gamertag.

That would not only be corporate suicide after all this hoopla, it would also probably violate consumer rights laws.

I don't think it's extreme at all. I share one Plus account on PS3 with my son, and lots of folks have more kids than I do. My account is activated on both consoles, and he has access to all of my Plus content.

That doesn't sound quite right on Live, but I'm not the expert on how Live works. This page implies that your Gold account can only be signed on to one console at a time, or is that changing on Xone?

http://support.xbox.com/en-US/billin...torage-changes

Specifically: "You can download your Xbox LIVE profile to multiple consoles. However, you can only sign in to one profile at a time."

For hardcore followers of this stuff, yes. But you have to wonder if the damage has not already been done. Regardless of all the reversals now, it has gotten out there among the mainstream press that Xbox is gonna cost more and you cant trade your games in and that camera will be watching all the time.

They are gonna have a hard time reversing that initial message. That stuff sticks with Average Joe and is not always easy to change that initial perception.

That's not about Gold, it's about the individual profile. If I have two consoles, I can't log into one 360 and simultaneously have my profile active on a separate 360. Using the same profile would be like your son trying to sign in as you while you were signed in on another PS3.