Microsoft said on Friday it will increase the price for its Xbox Live Gold memberships, threatening some gamers to jump to a rival Playstation.
A month’s membership to Xbox Live, required to play online games like “Call of Duty,” goes from $ 10 to $ 11, while a three-month subscription jumps $ 5 to $ 30.
Users who prefer to buy in bulk are even more out of luck, with Microsoft MSFT,
converting the 12 month option and $ 60 into a 6 month subscription. That means the price of a full year of Xbox Live Gold has effectively doubled from $ 5 a month to $ 10 a month.
Polished users speculated the change was part of an effort by Microsoft to get people to sign up for the monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which gives users access to a library of games for $ 10 a month.
“Every few months, Xbox has to do something to remind people that it’s not really in touch with gamers or reality,” says VentureBeat reporter Jeff Grubb tweeted about the change. “$ 120 for a year of Xbox Live Gold (to bully people on Game Pass) is the latest example.”
“I can’t wait to go into debt and sell all my organs to pay for Xbox Live Gold,” another user wrote.
Other gamers started doing the math on PlayStation’s SNE,
subscription offers, noting that 12 months from the Xbox rival still costs $ 60.
“I’m not sure what Xbox Live Gold does so much better than PlayStation Network to justify that price difference,” said one tweeted.
Indeed, the number of users who complained eventually got ‘PlayStation’ trending on Twitter, alongside ‘Xbox Live Gold’.
Microsoft defended its move in a blog post, saying that “Xbox Live Gold’s price hasn’t changed for years, and in some markets hasn’t changed for over 10 years.”
“We periodically review the value and pricing of our services to reflect changes in regional markets and to continue to invest in the Xbox community,” the company said.
This article was first published on NYPost.com