Microsoft released their fall dashboard update and amidst the cries of joy for DivX/Xvid codec support, they slipped in a nice little “gotcha” for some.  Rather than improving their Xbox Live Gold subscription benefits, they’ve made a move to increase its value by further gimping their free Xbox Live Silver membership.  Silver members will now face a week delay for all “free” content such as (but not limited to) game demos.

Some will be quick to defend Microsoft’s move saying that it will help alleviate Live-crippling bottlenecks and issues.  But to that I say, WTF?!  Aren’t we paying for Gold to support the bandwidth and infrastructure?  Are you telling me that in addition to the $50+/year from millions of people, that you need to now slap the hands of other people and tell them to get in line just to deliver on the service you’ve described as unmatched?  Unmatched is right.  Take my money and give me the best damned online service possible (which isn’t the same as “best available“) or make the damned thing free Microsoft.

There… I said it!  You can’t have it both ways.  You can’t claim the money taken in pays for infrastructure and bandwidth fees necessary to run the network and then when it’s convenient, do other things in the guise of “improving the network”.  What you’ve done is furthered the gap between Gold and Silver (at the expense of Silver members) and made the proverbial carrot that much larger.  Here’s hot new demo #26… NO SIR!  Get back in line!  You can have it NEXT Tuesday.  What in the hell were you thinking… you didn’t pay your Live Tax™.  You get week-old bandwidth… it costs us less.

Jesus.  It makes me angry just mocking it…

So now that early access to free content and demos is a differentiating factor to Gold, can we assume somehow that part of your money is (at least loosely) related to obtaining “free” demos?  Are we approaching the “pay for free demos” stage?  Is that what this is?  Are we being conditioned?  I only ask because Microsoft is good at conditioning people.  They’ve conditioned us to $60 games, and the industry followed.  They’ve conditioned us to feel a compelling online experience requires a fee.  They’ve conditioned us that “when” your 360 dies (not “if”) that you’ll be covered for 3 years… but only if it’s the RRoD.  Any other near-class-action-status issue and it’s $138 for repairs.
I’m sure they have some humdingers in their psychology department (sure, I realize it’s not likely to be named so blatantly, but you can’t tell me they don’t have people hired to evaluate likely reactions to moves like this and to guide them to the edge of what we’re likely to tolerate.)

I foresee a change coming.  Maybe it’ll be in 2008 or possibly as far away as 2009.  This change is going to go one of two ways.  Either Sony and Nintendo mount a compelling enough alternative that Microsoft is forced to compete with them by dropping some of their prices/over-priced things like Gold subscriptions, XBLA pricing tiers, accessory prices ($180 120GB hard drive anyone?) or they won’t.  In which case I’ll probably hand my 360 off to my son and be (largely) done with them.

Both Sony and Nintendo have some things very right and to a large degree, what’s keeping ME on the 360 is the game library… particularly the third party game library.  As that third party group of developers comes to grips with maximizing the potential of both the Wii and PS3, the 360 itself will become less and less compelling to me unless they change their ways.  At the end of 2007, we’ve already had a few non-compromised PS3 versions of multiplayer titles and we’ve had compelling third party Wii games, so THAT part of my prediction is already in motion.

Microsoft… it’s up to you.  Oh, and get Major Nelson off my frickin’ dashboard.  Nothing I should be able to do on my 360 should lead to him being on my TV.  That’s a near deal-breaker right there!

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