You may find this a little hard to believe, but I have never had to pay to play any game online. Well, that’s a lie. I did play City of Heroes for a little while but that was a subscription based thing. What I mean is I have never had to pay to play online on any of my consoles.

Obviously I haven’t payed on PS3 or a Nintendo console because it’s free. I also don’t have a PS4 so there has been no need for a Playstation Plus account just yet. I do have an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One.

I have never paid for Xbox Live.

I first got my Xbox 360 in 2008. I didn’t have an original Xbox, so a gold subscription was something new to me.

To be honest, I can’t remember where i got my first 12 month subscription from. I know I didn’t pay for it. I think someone gave it to me. It was a great start, even though I didn’t have any games I wanted to play online. What I did have was Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and bolts and a free download for the original Banjo-Kazooie (the reason why I bought the 360.) The console also came bundled with a copy of Lips, Microsoft’s Singstar clone and most importantly a Pussycat Dolls CD/DVD pack.

Sadly I never listened to the CD nor did I watch the DVD.

The best thing about Lips, was it came with a bonus 3-month gold subscription.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I was working for GAME at this point in time. That’s probably how I ended up with the original 12-months. Not too much later I became a fully fledged Manager of my own store. This meant I got to go to the manger conferences/vendor shows.

 Me during the GAME days holding a petition for an R18+ video game rating in Australia. For some reason the photographer thought it would be a good idea to take the photo next to a bunch of G rated Wii games…

I have to say, major props to Microsoft. They ALWAYS came to the party. Every conference they gave all the managers at least 12-months worth of gold. Some times more. Not to mention a plethora of games.

I think I ended up going to four or five of these conferences, meaning my gold subscription has always been topped up. Today is March 28th 2014.

I’m starting to get worried. My subscription runs out April 21st. This year. As in next month.

$494. Well, near enough. That’s how much I haven’t payed to play my Xbox games online. $89.95 is how much 12-months will cost me. The issue I face is that I don’t know if there are any games I want to play online at the moment. But if I don’t renew I lose my tenure.

Man… The issues we face in life huh?