Microsoft said Friday that it will increase the price of its Xbox Live Gold subscriptions – sparking threats by some players to abandon the ship for rival Playstation.
The month-long subscription to Xbox Live, which is required to play games like “Call of Duty” online, is increasing from $ 10 to $ 11, while a three-month plan is jumping from $ 5 to $ 30.
Users who prefer to buy in bulk are even more unlucky, with Microsoft MSFT,
turning your $ 60 12-month option into a 6-month plan. This means that the price for an entire year of Xbox Live Gold has effectively doubled from $ 5 to $ 10 a month.
Angry users speculated that the move was part of a Microsoft effort to get people to subscribe to its monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which gives users access to a game library for $ 10 a month.
“Every few months, Xbox needs to do something to remind people that it’s not really in touch with players or reality,” VentureBeat reporter Jeff Grubb tweeted about change. “$ 120 for a year of Xbox Live Gold (to intimidate people on the Game Pass) is the most recent example.”
“I can’t wait to be in debt and sell all my organs just to pay for Xbox Live Gold,” another user I wrote.
Other players started to do the accounts on the PlayStation SNE,
subscription offers, pointing out that 12 months from rival Xbox still cost $ 60.
“I’m not sure what Xbox Live Gold does much better than PlayStation Network to justify this price difference,” said one person tweeted.
In fact, the number of users complaining ended up making “PlayStation” a trend on Twitter along with “Xbox Live Gold”.
Microsoft in a blog post defended its move, saying that “the price of Xbox Live Gold has not changed for years and in some markets, it has not changed for more than 10 years.”
“We periodically assess the value and prices of our services to reflect changes in regional markets and continue to invest in the Xbox community,” said the company.
This article was first published on NYPost.com