Xbox 360: 28M Sold WW | Xbox LIVE: 17M Subscribers, Majority Gold
I know, I know, I’m behind the times… this was announced on Monday, and picked up all over the place including Edge. I just wanted to commemorate the moment as I’m particularly proud of the LIVE subscriber numbers. For context, I joined Microsoft six years ago to help convince the industry that a subscription-based online service was a good idea. We promised that we would deliver a world-class service that “just worked”, and would build a huge worldwide gaming community that would benefit gamers, game developers, and publishers. Not many people remember now, but there was a ton of skepticism from all over. Some thought people wouldn’t be willing to pay for a quality service, and others didn’t think gamers would want to extend their game experiences with DLC. I think it’s fair to say those arguments are finally dead and gone.
What I’m most excited about is the future. Over the holiday we had 1.5M users on LIVE concurrently. Think about that for a moment… Xbox LIVE is the world’s largest TV-connected social network. And I think the next five years are going to be just as exciting as the last as game developers, publishers, and users all start leveraging the social connectivity of that network. It’s going to be a fun ride!
Related posts:
7 Comments
Comments are closed.
Wasn’t there also a lot of controversy over integrating voice? And not allowing dial up users to connect. XBL proved a lot of things true, and is one of MS’s biggest successes.
I have been borrowing a PS3 for this week, and I must say the PSN is not even close to coming to the quality of Xbox LIVE. Kudos to the team at Microsoft for creating a quality product.
Now, back to work with another quality product; VS2005.
Whilst the achievements are impressive, I believe it’s merely a toe in an ocean ‘achievement’ compared to what is possible if you believe in the digital future.
One immediate industry-defining improvement would be if 360’s could be used as a HD/SD set-top box with storage HDD. Add to this the 360’s current features and you’ve got a compelling living-room product for the masses not just gamers’.
Immediate issues which stop the 360 being this universal sitting room product are thus in my humble opinion: -
(I) RROD – extremely poor build quality.
(II) Brand image due to RROD and MS history of releasing products faulty/buggy.
(III) 360 noise-level. This is actual quite high even when the DVD player is not spinning. Audiophiles would not look kinder to such fundamental design flaw.
To be clear I’m not being negative just highlighting for me some real issues the 360/MS has to make Xbox this universal-must-have/Wiiattractive/livingroom-machine..
:O)
Glad to see you are back, buddy! Happy new year!
I hope you keep updating this blog and possibly telling us some good new on co-op games too
Best!
Good news on co-op games? Go grab Left 4 Dead.
I’ve been having a blast with it… best co-op experience in quite a while IMO!
I own Left 4 Dead, buddy! It is really awesome! I´ve been playing it a lot since I bought it.
It is impressive how valve paid attention to a lot of details, like: you can go to the bathroom and your character will play by himself, you can change difficult without going to the lobby, there is split-creen and drop-in/drop-out.
That is how a co-op game should be done always
"Xbox LIVE: 17M Subscribers, Majority Gold" – forgive me if I’m missing something, but the article you link to makes no mention of this.
I find it hard to believe that there are over 8.5m Gold subscribers, unless you’re doing something fudgey like counting all accounts over the lifetime of the service, including trials.
Regardless, whatever the real super-sekrit number is, it’s still a small minority of 360 owners (heavily concentrated in the US), and still orders of magnitude lower than the numbers of people playing games online on Mac/PC, PSN, Wii and DS.
It’s a shame that Microsoft are persisting with this politicised walled garden approach, denying gamers workable cross-platform online gaming, or 360 games based on business models that don’t fit in XBL’s pigeon holes.
There are now many multiformat franchises (Call of Duty, Rock Band, EA Sports, Resi Evil) which would benefit hugely from not having their online userbases needlessly balkanised by vendor lock-in. There’s no technical reason why these games couldn’t be developed to play together across 360 and PS3 (and PC and even Wii in some cases).
The 2002-vintage Xbox Live strategy would make sense if you’d sold 100m consoles, and online gaming on the other platforms hadn’t co-opted most of Live’s convenience features by this point. Time for a rethink?