The price of a Gold subscription to Xbox Live is destined to go up – and up, and up, at least according to industry analyst Michael Pachter.
Speaking as part of a discussion with GTTV yesterday, Pachter commented that “we all know” the price of a Gold subscription will eventually rise in order to keep Microsoft’s profit margins looking healthy. “You can’t hook a guy into Xbox Live if he’s playing on a PC,” Pachter noted as to why Microsoft appears to have abandoned games software for the PC. “That’s the other problem,” he went on, “you really want to hook every gamer who has a 360, you want them to buy all their games on 360, play everything multi player, pay you fifty bucks a year so that, in a couple of years, it’s a hundred bucks a year… and that’s going up, we all know that. It’s a profit deal.”
At the present time, a year’s subscription to Xbox Live Gold costs forty pounds per annum. Microsoft has yet to respond to computerandvideogames.com’s requests for a reply to Pachter’s comments. The idea has, predictably enough, gone down like a lead balloon with gamers, although many have been quick to point out that, for an analyst, Pachter’s previous predictions have a somewhat less than one hundred percent success rate – one of his most famous gaffes being his claim that Sony would release the PS3 without a Blu-ray DVD drive in order to keep down costs!
