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

Legacy?

[Shadow Wrought]

If the 360 isn't fully compatible with the XBox, won't this lead to some disconnect in XBox Live down the road? How long will they support folks play Halo 2 on XBox when Halo 3 is out for the 360?

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?

Where are the numbers from?

[Qzukk]

Is it immoral Blizzard campers making money selling the Chinese subscribers they're farming? Let's talk about how all this camping and farming is affecting our economy. Clearly, duped subscribers are being used to inflate the importance of this third-rate console. What'll happen when the admins discover this and issue a rollback or worse, start just cancelling Microsoft and Blizzard accounts for participating in this hack?

great, but...

[almeitus]

that number would be significantly reduced if they banned all the cheaters and a-holes you seem to run into on a regular basis....

No major MMORPG!

[EastCoastLA]

This has to be the biggest problem. They have great infastructure, but no MMORPG. No Warcraft, no FF.., no Evercrack. This is a major slap in the face. Don't get me wrong Halo 2 ROCKS, but come on Microsoft. Wake up!

Oh, by the way, Virtual ON on Xbox live would also Rock! enough Said!

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.

Re:A bit overplayed?

[badasscat]

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.)

Re:Regardless Of Your View Of Microsoft

[fondue]

1. Considering the system has been running for over 2 and a half years, it's a pretty pathetic total.
2. It's not clear whether it includes trial subscriptions.
3. It represents less than one tenth of the Xbox user base, hardly the lynchpin of the system that MS hyped it to be.
4. More people worldwide play online games on PS2, even though you have to buy additional peripherals and there are only a scant number of online games available.

In the coming console generation, ALL the competing formats (including the PSP and DS) offer online gaming without subscription fees. Yet the Xbox 360 clings to this broken model.

It's time for MS to re-evaluate whether they want Xbox to offer a worthwhile, competitive platform for consumers and developers, or just keep blindly pursuing this 'content delivery' pipedream while Sony keep kicking their arses.

Re:Regardless Of Your View Of Microsoft

[Saige]

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.