Xbox 360 owners who willingly agree to pay the higher XBL rate are a poison that will continue the march of abuse against gamers.

First, they are required to pay for a service that is free on EVERY SINGLE OTHER GAMING PLATFORM. Despite this, they are not given free bonuses; indeed, they are further abused by the inclusion of advertisements, P2P servers, and an archaic points system designed to make you spend more money than you want.

This is in addition to the hardware abuses, which are even more heinous. We are all well aware of the RROD problem; in this day and age, there is no justification for a consumer product having a failure rate above 5%, let alone over 30. This is compounded by Microsoft's steadfast refusal to release information on the causes and reported rate, instead choosing to throw money at a defective product by replacing them for "free", which is no longer even the case. This demonstrated that it was possible to sell a poorly-made product; gamers would tolerate not being able to play for weeks to get their console fixed for free, ignoring the fact that it shouldn't have needed fixed in the first place.

Even the newer models are not immune. The disc-scratching is an utterly insane problem to have, as disc drive technologies have long since surpassed that issue over a decade ago. They didn't even truly fix the heating problem!

Lastly, after years of insulting the Wii, Microsoft has abandoned their core audience in favor of the casual family player by adopting a control scheme that will prove even more useless than the Wii's when it comes to any kind of complex game. The lack of buttons and total reliance on a camera will ultimately doom the Kinect to shovelware titles.

Ultimately, paying a higher cost will prove to pricks like Pachter and the Koticks of the industry that you are an easily manipulated gamer that will continue to blindly follow your console of choice, rather than see that you've been exploited.