Amazon slashes Xbox Live price 40%

Good deal for people who need an Xbox Live subscription! I just bought mine two months ago, so I'm good for a while longer.

Uh, when I visted the link it was 14% off, not 40%.

It is unfortunate that Live is not free, but $60 a year is a pretty trivial cost for the entertainment value, specially when you compare it to how far $60 will go for most entertainment these days.
I didn't realize you needed a Gold membership to access Netflix. If I were Netflix I'd be upset that they don't have access to all the silver members.

I once heard a Microsoft rep rationalize it as such:

One video game costs $50 (this was during the original Xbox era). So for the price of one game per year, you can enjoy all these services and endless hours of play.

Made sense to me at the time. But as PSN gets more robust, that argument holds less water. Still, I renew my subscription every year with little hesitation.

Yeah that would be true if it wasn't for the fact we have been getting it for free on the PC for years with much less limitations and much less advertisements and $10's cheaper.

Also seems to have been one of there short term deals cause it's now up to $38 (you have to look at the different vendors to see Amazons pricing) which is still better then $50

I love my free online play on my PS3

Well it's not just the online play alone. The use of friends lists with private chats and ways to compare each other's in-game achievements is something special. I'm able to talk with an old college friend over the headset while we're playing different games. So I'm able to ask him if he wants to play Halo, and still talk to him as he switches the disc out of the tray and joins up. I haven't done any PC multiplayer in a while, but Counter Strike was lonely experience by comparison.

I love the free play on PS3 also, but I havent found a game that I would play on the PS3 that isn't on my 360 and I have both... I'd rather pay for the XBL account

I paid $12/year for memberships at KMart a long time ago, clearanced because some of the coupons had expired in the package. They still had good coupons for a Billiards game and Live headsets.

Still, the bigger picture is that Sony, IIRC, doesn't restrict publishers from charging for their servers, so you'll see overpriced MMORPGs showing up on PS3, not on XBL, which is a shame. I might play somehting like that if I didn't have to pay anything beyond my XBL Gold Another nice benefit of XBL is the availablity of HD content from Netflix. I have a 3/mo plan, but we find ourselves watching the streaming content more and more.

As for those syaing "PC content has been free" - what are you smoking? Sure some of it is free, but the most popular stuff isn't - namely WoW. On top of paying a monthly fee (What is it, $10/mo? i.e. $120/year - 4 times what XBL costs?) - you are also locked into a single game. With XB, ALL of my online gaming is covered by that one fee.

Yeah but does xbox have any games compareable to WOW or any of the fee based PC games? I do not think Xbox has any MMORPGS. PS3 is getting DC Online which may not even have a fee.