Today, as you’re probably no doubt aware by now, Microsoft announced a series of price hikes for the Xbox LIVE online gaming subscription service. 12 months of the Gold service will cost you an extra $10 a year ($60, to be precise) – the first time the price of subscribing to LIVE has been raised since the introduction of the service in 2002.

And you know what? It’s totally justified.

In the 8 years that Xbox LIVE has been around — as pointed out by Jerry Johnson, head of Xbox LIVE Studios Europe, at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival last week — Microsoft has done nothing but add more and more features to a service that, at the beginning, many gamers considered brilliant value for money. From the introduction of the Bungie.net service in HALO 2 and the Video Marketplace to the addition of Twitter, Last.FM, Netflix, party chat and even more besides to the NXE dashboard (and, of course, the NXE itself) Microsoft has always made a point of giving users a lot of internet-based stuff to do on their Xbox 360 aside from play games.

This is a trend that shows no signs of stopping – the Fall update for your Xbox 360 will include ESPN content and Kinect features allowing you to use the Kinect to control your 360, should you decide to buy a camera. (If you don’t, keep it to yourself and don’t whinge about it in the comments, because it’s irrelevant.) Whether you decide to take advantage of all of the Xbox 360′s features or not, Microsoft has always made Xbox LIVE as great a service as it can be through continuous expansion and improvement. Even now, changes to the most basic parts of the infrastructure such as voice chat are being made, with a higher-quality codec arriving with the Fall update to improve voice comms in all of your games. And let’s not forget that every day, Xbox LIVE is constantly expanding as more and more people sign up for Gold – the money to fund the extra servers doesn’t come from nowhere.

These guys don't pay for themselves y'know.

Throughout all of this, Microsoft has not considered a price hike until now. I might be alone in saying this, but I’m surprised it took them this long when you consider how much they have given us for what we’re currently paying. In order to fund future developments, especially expensive commercial ones like the deals Microsoft have signed with Hulu and ESPN, there has to be a reserve of money to dip into, and a $10 price hike for 12 months of Xbox LIVE — which, let’s face it, you’ll probably pay for anyway despite your complaining — is an easy way of doing this. Kinect didn’t build itself y’know.

The more liberal-minded readers might denounce Microsoft’s capitalistic ways, but at the end of the day Microsoft is a corporation with business sense. It has investors and shareholders who are requiring it to generate revenue, or else they’ll stop providing financial support. It’s the basis on which all of the world’s largest companies are built – at the end of the day, money is at the heart of everything. It’s an undeniable fact and while you might feel ripped off looking at a bigger picture like this, why not take a look inside your own wallet?

I’ll keep it simple. Ten bucks extra a year is 83 cents a month. 3 cents a day. That’s a cup of Starbucks every three months. Doesn’t sound that much anymore, right?

ShockwaveLover, our resident Aussie forum mod, had this to say in a post he made earlier today:

“Buying a console is cheap, but you’re doing a deal with the devil. You lock yourself to one distributor, and you’re at the mercy of their pricing whims.

Let’s face it, not many existing Xbox Live players are going to switch to the PS3, Wii or PC because of this, simply because it’d cost more than paying the new fees. You’ve invested too much in the system (via games and stats and friends) and Microsoft has got you over a barrel.”

Frankly, he’s got the wrong end of the stick here. Despite what you might be thinking about Microsoft’s business sense and their big, nasty investors and shareholders, Microsoft’s Xbox staff are, at heart, a bunch of folks who really love their videogames. Why else would they work for Xbox? A lot of thought will have gone into the decision-making process that resulted in the $10 price hike — which is, to be honest, hardly life-changing — and I have no doubt that the extra money the company makes from this new pricing scheme will go towards creating even more great features for the Xbox LIVE service, the NXE dashboard and gaming projects further down the line.

People won’t leave Xbox because of this – not because they’re “locked in” to a console, as ShockwaveLover thinks, but because they love the console they have, the games they play on it and the friends they’ve made and interact with on a daily basis. We might all have a little rant and a whine about how this price hike is just too much for us to comprehend but once we’ve exhausted our one liners we’ll stump up, pay, and enjoy the service we get anyway.

The finer things in life always cost ya’.

Oh, and uh, I don’t own a 360. And nobody’s paid me anything for what I’ve written here. So can those accusations. But if you must direct them at me, I’ve got a Twitter for you to berate me at: @yamstersg