Michael Pachter, the internet’s favorite gaming soothsayer, turned up on GameTrailer’s Bonus Round once again this week. What did the Wedbush Morgan analyst see in his crystal ball this time around? Not only did he declare that Microsoft has given up on PC gaming, but he also predicted that the price of Xbox Live Gold subscriptions will be going up sometime in the near future.
“It’s a profit deal,” Pachter claimed, responding to a fan question about the dearth of ports from Xbox 360 to PC. “Microsoft wants you to never play a game again on your PC and play everything on your 360,” he went on to suggest, adding, “You give a PC gamer an incentive to buy a 360 if you put something that he really wants only on the 360.”
But why would Microsoft want to lure customers away from one of their own platforms?
“You can’t hook a guy into Xbox Live Gold if he’s playing on PC. So, I mean, that’s the other problem is you really wanna hook every gamer who has a 360, you want them to buy all their games on 360, play everything multiplayer, pay you 50 bucks a year so that in a couple years, it’s 100 bucks a year. And that’s going up — we all know that.”
It might sound crazy to actually raise the price of Xbox Live, especially when neither of Microsoft’s competitors are currently charging for online play. Then again, Microsoft has attempted to add value to Gold memberships for years now by piling on exclusive features like Netflix streaming and, any day now, Facebook integration — perhaps in anticipation of a price hike further down the line?
source: @1up
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