Subscription Ideas for Next gen Consoles

Game industry pundits are currently specualting on what the Xbox 720 and PS4 will do to improve game consoles in the near future (Names for these next next gen consoles are of course still tightly under wraps). One of the ideas that the games industry has put out is that New Consoles will have a built in subscription option to lower new costs and attempt to get buyers to commit to their respective platforms in the long term.

These ideas have been brought to the table by many games industry pros but this article borrows heavily from a recent CandVG article about the future of Xbox; WiiU2 and Playstation Next:

Microsoft has been trialling a console subscription model in the States, where customers pay $99 upfront for a new Xbox 360 bundled with Kinect and a two year Xbox Live Gold account, the subs then kick in with a Xbox subscriber being billed $14.99 for the following 24 months.

An insider Sony executive says that Sony considered this very same subscription idea for the PS3  and think it would make sense for the platform holders to roll it out from the offset of the next generation. This follows a similar model for users of mobile phones whomoften want to stay at the front of technologys wave and pick up the latest models when they are released. With consoles and modern smartphones coming in at similar premium prices this amkes a lot of sense. It has worked for Apple with iPhone and iPad, so there certainly is potential for consoles to do the same.

The CandVG article goes on to say "The subscription model also allows the platform holders to sell their high-power machines at a low deposit RRP, meaning that the huge investment required to make these machines won't be reflected in such exorbitant product costs. The PS3 suffered tremendously when it launched at $599, but a subscription model would likely cut that price down by more than half."