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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.
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I'm guessing that part of the reason why the XBox Live user base has increased is beacuse the consoles have gone down in price. I wonder how many of those 2 mil users are planning on upgrading to a 360 right away?
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Yeah, more people play PS2 online. But in an environment where each company sets up their own servers, and each is set up differently, and you need accounts for each game server, and the whole thing is very fractured and ad-hoc.
Xbox Live gives a complete, integrated system. I can play one game, see who on my friends list is playing in other games, and send game invites to them. The Xbox 360 is going to add a HELL of a lot more to the experience, also.
Yes, there are plenty of games that offer free online. But think about it - $50 a YEAR? How much is that, really? Cable in most places costs more, and that's the price of one game. Besides, with the libraries the 360 is putting together, EVERY game will be Live-enabled at almost no cost to the developers. So even if the game has no online content, you'll still be connected and accessible to your friends, can pause to get messages or have voice chat - and there's all sorts of new stuff coming.
Compared to all the other online games I've played, I'm much more impressed with what Xbox Live offers.
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However, 10% really isn't all that big of a number.
I agree. I'd also like to know how many of that 10% are active Live users. I remember another number MS trumpeted when Halo 2 was fairly new that, if you also did the arithmetic, suggested only 9% of Halo 2 owners had ever taken the game online, and only a tiny percentage were online at any given time.
Myself, I let my XBL subscription lapse last year. I just got annoyed with all the teen and pre-teen idiots floating around, and found that the level of competition was generally actually significantly below what the computer AI could give me. For example, there was one course in PGR2 where all my human opponents would crash into the wall on the same turn every single time around the track. When everybody was running in a pack and this happened simultaneously, it was pretty funny. But it was not very good competition, or very much fun if you really wanted to race. All XBL has proven to me is how dumb humans are, both in their gameplay and in their witty banter during gameplay.
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.
That's probably about right, though the 60% number for free access seems a little high. Other than online-only games, I can't think of even many PC games that get that kind of online participation, or that ever would.
I think the reality that a lot of companies don't want to acknowledge at the moment is that there are a lot of people - in fact probably a large majority of people - who want to play games but just do not want to play online. They know about online games (hell, if you own an Xbox, you know about Xbox Live), they have the money to pay for it if need be, but they just do not want to play that way. It's just not as great of an experience as it was promised to be. This isn't true of every developer or publisher, but it is true of those who have really leveraged their entire future on online business models, and who are pushing the marketing dollars heavily in that direction.
There's a lot of hype in online gaming right now, but the reality just doesn't match that hype, either in the user experience or in the number of players. I don't think online is going away, and I also think it will grow slowly over time, but it will reach a saturation point that I think is much lower than companies like Microsoft think it is. Then we'll have a period of adjustment, and eventually an equillibrium where both online and offline games co-exist, but with traditional offline gaming regaining some of the cachet that it's lost.
The way MS and others hype online gaming, you'd think everybody played that way... but by MS's own numbers, at least 90% of their own customers do not subscribe to their online service, and in fact the growth of the console installed base itself is outstripping the growth of the base of XBL users. (In other words, the percentage of wired Xboxes is actually dropping over time, even as the total number of XBL users slowly rises.)