Are 360 owners FORCED to buy premium?

[angelx]

Yeppers its free to download demos of the arcade stuff and theres a lot of demos of games on there now. It saves you buying something or renting.

[EvilBoris]

I bought a Core, mainly because I dont use my XBOX for Live at the moment. In the future if I might pick up a HD, but the only online games I play are mmorpgs, and I use my PC for them.

I mainly bought my 360 to buy the odd exclusive console based games not available on the PC. Marketplace looks pretty crappy to me apart from the old arcade multiplayer games, but its hardly worth picking up a subcription just to play them.

You can do almost everything with a silver subscription (the free one) bar playing online.

You can download everything from marketplace demos/trial/live arcade game, you can use voice chat etc.

You only need a gold acount to play online

[NekoFever]

IMO MS should be shot for charging ?70 for the HD, it's only a 2.5 Serial ATA notebook hard drive that the 360 uses. For the price there asking, you could buy the same drive with an 80GB storage capacity for your notebook. So why the ?70 price tag for a 20GB?

Official accessories are always expensive because they're trying to make back some of the huge losses that they make on the console itself. I can't hold it against them making ?30 or so on the HD when they lose ?150+ on the actual console, but then they would be shot if they charged cost for the hardware. People were already complaining at it being ?270.

[Lebowski]

going back to the orignal post i think you made a mistake not looking in HMV properley as they dont force the bundles on you, i got my 360 from the leeds branch and he set me up a freebie discount games card thing at the same time which basicly means that you get a fiver off every time you buy an xbox game from them or in my case ridge racer for under half price as he ran the 360 through the card building up mucho points and an instant discount on my game.

So an instant discount with no dodgy overselling of a forced bundle, and the game i wanted with the machine, not bad really eh.