2 Million Xbox Live Users And Counting

Gamasutra is reporting that Xbox Live has reached the milestone of 2 Million subscribers, essentially a doubling of the service's membership in the last year. From the article: "Microsoft took the opportunity to re-iterate that Xbox Live is a universal service between both the original Xbox and the forthcoming Xbox 360, due to debut this November. Thus, gamers can move their Xbox Live memberships seamlessly from Xbox to Xbox 360, giving Microsoft an initial subscriber advantage if either Sony or Nintendo plan a more complete online service for their next-generation consoles. "

Comments

A bit overplayed?

[alvinrod]

According to sales figures the Xbox has sold roughly 20 million units world wide. If there are 2 million subscribers online with Xbox live simple arithmatic yields 10% of Xbox customers use their consoles online.

While this doesn't seem like a lot, the figure is/has been growing slowly. I believe a lot of it has to do with the unvailability of high speed internet access for a good deal of customers as well as people being unwilling to pay the subscription ($50 I think) costs.

However, 10% really isn't all that big of a number. I'm guessing that it's slightly under since there have more than likely been more than 20 million Xbox consoles sold. When Microsoft can get that number up to 30%, maybe they might have a cause for celebration.

This just proves that Nintendo and Sony were both right for shying away from the online market during the current generation. 10% doesn't seem enough to justify the associated costs and difficulties with setting up an infrastructure that will work. Microsoft does have the advantage in that they already have one set up and it will be easy for them to apply it to their next generation console. Nintendo and Sony will almost be starting from scratch.

I don't know how much more successful the online gaming business will be for the different companies. Each have or seem to be taking different approaches. Nintendo is offering downloadable games for their next generation consoles and is working on getting the DS online. Microsoft has a subsciption model where they handle all online gaming. Sony has generally let each company decide for themselves how to run the online portion of their games.

I'm willing to bet that online gaming will continue to grow and probably peak at around 60% in some cases where it's free and easy to use and as low as 20% in instances where fees are associated. Given that Microsoft is offering both a silver (free) and gold (fee) subsciption to Xbox Live, it will become more difficult to project actual figures. My guess is that they will lump both together to claim a higher percentage of consumers are using Xbox Live so they can use the figure to sell more consoles. Nintendo will have trouble tracking theirs since Revolutions can probably communicate wirelessly without going through any gaming servers. Sony will just keep talking about how many Tflops the PS3 can push.

Online gaming can be great, but let's keep plenty of good non-online games on the market as well.