I may have told this story on GAF before.
Back in 2010 or 2011, I won a "lifetime supply" of Xbox Live Gold from Microsoft for one of those "download and win" sweepstakes they'd have on the 360 dashboard -- you know, where you'd download a branded gamerpic and that would count as an entry?
"Lifetime" by their standards was 30 years, shipped to me in a big cardboard box as 30 individually packaged 12-month subscription cards.
I gave away some of them to friends, sold others, but I kept three cards for myself. Three years is the maximum pre-paid amount you can have, and there was no guarantee how long these cards would even still be usable (and the release forms I signed when I won explicitly pointed this fact out). So, it was kind of a "use it now or lose it" situation for me.
After my three years ran out, I had no desire to pay for Xbox Live Gold. These sorts of premium subscriber services are some of the biggest scams in gaming right now. There is nothing that they offer that is actually worth paying the subscription fee for. You may think there is, because it is something you have paid for and use frequently, but that in my opinion is just part of the scheme. Everything about those services has been engineered to create a false sense of value.
Like, for example, the "pay the subscription fee and get games for free." Those games aren't free. If they were free, these companies would be hemorrhaging money by giving away literal hundreds of dollars of games every month. But they aren't, are they? In fact, developers like Psyonix say that services like Playstation Plus made Rocket League more successful than they would have been otherwise. It's almost like you're paying Sony to be their marketing team. In return, you get a shiny status symbol that says you're rich enough to afford the subscription.
And multiplayer matchmaking? Paying for that is a joke. That's not to say running that service costs $0, but compared to the kinds of expenses in modern games, it would probably cost 5% or less of a game's overall budget. In my case, when I had Xbox Live Gold for those three years, the games I wanted to pay weren't populated with players anyway. How many resources are being wasted for games that aren't even active anymore? Are you comfortable paying for the ability to have players sitting in a Puzzle Fighter HD lobby for an hour and never getting a match?
It's all a farce. It's fake value generated by marketing engineers who sit in board rooms all day and figure out new ways to get people to pay for things they don't actually need. It's the same line of thinking Microsoft had over making you pay $2 for Xbox 360 wallpapers, except somehow this one stuck.
Don't pay for Xbox Live Gold. Or PS+.