Not taking offence at all. More to do with if MS wants give people GP for $1, I'll take it and it's a good deal. And that people picking it apart are basically Sony fans, since their sub plan is regular price.
Not too often in life people try to defend getting charged more by corporations. But if it suits their agenda that paying full price for games is better than paying $1 for 3 years of first party day one games, so be it.
It's like the old PS3 days when Sony was losing $200-300 per unit at the beginning. Who cares. Let them. Whether or not someone liked the launch games, the $600 price was cheaper than BR players which were about $1000 and PS3 even plays games so it is a double featured system. PS3 was even cheaper than Sony's own dedicated BR players.
Why complain? Sounds like a good deal. Let Sony's finance department worry about losing money. Di you want to get charged $600 for PS3? Or $1000?
This just means that you don't understand the market. Of course it's a great deal, because as I mentioned, MS needs some sort of winner product/service as they have had a terrible few years. Even the One X meant nothing in the market other than a great PR move for their core base, as its release didn't end up stimulating sales of the console.
What I want you to understand is the following: No service that is given away for free is sustainable. What does that mean and why do people care when criticising a service? It's simple, if there is no financial incentive, no company will continue in that line of business/service. It's a bit bigger whether you get a great deal or not, it has to be a win/win scenario for both consumers and producers, otherwise it goes away, or it changes.
Let's take an example, mobile apps. Everyone had rushed to try to get everyone to install theirs and no one knew what were the proper price points, they just knew there were hundreds of millions of potential new customers and they wanted those bucks. The result was a race to the bottom, where eventually every app was a couple of bucks or just plain free. Sounds great, excellent value for customers, right? Well, not exactly, in the case of games, you can't have a sustainable business giving away your games, you need to pay facilities, developers, equipment, so on and so forth, something has got to give.
So, if you can't exist with the price of the game on the story, what do you do? Well, voila, the answer was, Games as a Service and micro transactions, which lead to the discovery of whales, marketing to children and people with addictive personalities and other lovely things. So, the developers adapted to the market, created awful games designed to draw you in then annoy you until you agreed to either give them money or quit.
That is why when people brag over a service because of stupid console wars (and anyone that does has the mental maturity of a 5 year old) then that is why this is pointed out: anyone can give away something in a closed system with a captive audience. Anyone.
The question is, how will the service fare once it stops being given away for free? How long is MS willing to keep funding this system for tiny, tiny revenues? What proportion of customers are paying the actual monthly fee vs the given away memberships? And so on and so forth. They are relevant questions and they spur conversation and they will reveal how sustainable it is.
What is not healthy is having the attitude of "fuck corporations, let them bleed!" because that just reveals a lack of understanding that that thing you enjoy will disappear if it doesn't end up being very profitable for any company.