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Gamers have known about the $10 Xbox Live price hike for a few weeks, but the new pricing scheme goes into effect today, prompting Microsoft to offer these words of “comfort” to gamers who are understandably miffed at the new pricing: “Now we get those Call of Duty map packs before anybody else does. We’ve got Gears and Halo, of course, as exclusives. We continue to get exclusives on the service as well. And we’ve gone from 400,000 members in our first year to 25 million. So during that time, we’ve definitely got to fund it, and we want to add more and more and more. ESPN is a great example. No extra charge for Xbox Live Gold members. But we want to continue to bring that content in. We also want to continue to innovate on all dimensions, whether it’s social, entertainment, or gaming. So there you go.” What does this boil down to? Microsoft has to pay for exclusives. Now you do too!  |