Microsoft said Friday it will raise the price of its Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, prompting threats from some gamers to jump on the rival Playstation.
A one-month subscription to Xbox Live, which is required to play games like “Call of Duty” online, increases from $ 10 to $ 11, while a three-month plan increases from $ 5 to $ 30.
Users who prefer to buy in bulk are even luckier, with Microsoft MSFT,
turning your 12-month, $ 60 option into a 6-month plan. That means the price of a full year of Xbox Live Gold has effectively doubled, from $ 5 a month to $ 10 a month.
Troubled users speculated that the change was part of a Microsoft effort to get people to sign up for the monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which allows users to access a game library for $ 10 a month. .
“Every few months, Xbox has to do something to remind people that it’s not really that much in touch with gamers or reality,” VentureBeat reporter Jeff Grubb said. he tweeted about change. “$ 120 for a year of Xbox Live Gold (to intimidate people on Game Pass) is the latest example.”
“I can’t wait to get into debt and sell all my organs just to pay for Xbox Live Gold,” another user said he wrote.
Other players started doing math on PlayStation SNEs,
subscription deals, noting that 12 months of rival Xbox still cost $ 60.
“I’m not sure what Xbox Live Gold does much better than PlayStation Network to justify this price gap,” one person said he tweeted.
In fact, the number of users who complained eventually got “PlayStation” to tend to Twitter alongside “Xbox Live Gold”.
Microsoft posted its decision in a blog post and said that “the price of Xbox Live Gold has not changed for years and, in some markets, has not changed for more than ten years.”
“Periodically, we evaluate the value and price of our services to reflect changes in regional markets and continue to invest in the Xbox community,” the company said.
This article was first published on NYPost.com