Xbox Live - You won't be missed

Before December ends my Xbox live membership will be expiring and I am undecided at this moment if I'll even bother renewing it right away.

As this year has moved on I actually use the Live portion of Xbox less and less.

My plan was from September on to play a lot of Gears of War Horde from the new game and that really has not happened.  Thus far I have played one session and haven't even put any time into the campaign (which I was hoping to Co-Op with some east coast friends).

And other than that pretty much all of my games are single player experiences which is how I like it.

So, by not renewing what am I really missing out on?  Not a whole lot that I can see.

At least not until Borderlands 2 comes out which I am pretty sure that I'll be playing just as much as the 1st.

My current Xbox gaming list shows me no need to give Microsoft more of my money for a service that I'm not really using currently.

Skyrim - and lets be honest with Skyrim, all of my gaming is offline for that anyway because of Microsofts horrible policy of having to have the latest patch on all of your games to play while online.  Skyrim is a single player game that has zero multi-player experience, yet I cannot stay online and chat with my friends because I refuse to download the latest patch?  Horrible. Also horrible that the latest patch broke some fundamentals of the game which is why I won't update.

Red Dead Redemption - I got a few hours into this game and really want to get back to it because it was pretty fun.  Once again a single player experience, I won't touch the multi-player.

Mass Effect - Single Player

Star Wars FU2 - Single Player

Gears of War 3 - the only game that I would even use Xbox Live for.  While I can run through the game single player to beat the campaign I want to run through the game with some friends instead.  So, maybe I'll get to this after I'm done beating Skyrim. I do have a couple of 1 month Xbox Live codes and I might just use one of those to go through and beat Gears instead of a whole year subscription.

The only thing that might be missed is the group chat feature while playing my single player games and admittedly I don't really use that feature nearly as much as I used to.  I also think it's BS that you have to have an Xbox Live Gold account to use the feature but it's their system and their rules.

And, truth be told, I've been using my PS3 a lot more this past year than I have been using any of my other gaming systems (oh, my poor unused Wii Wii).

I don't need to pay a yearly fee to stream my Netflix through my PS3, it plays all of my recent Movie and TV-Season purchases that are all on Blu-Ray and I can play online with my friends without giving Sony money month after month.