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Xbox Live Cracks 6 Million, Windows Cost Revealed

Posted by Zonk on from the lots-of-uno-played-every-day dept.

Kotaku offers up a Microsoft press release on the unexpectedly early arrival of 6,000,000 players to the Xbox Live service. Along with some rather odd statistics to pass on (over 2,300,000,000 hours in-game time spent on the network already), there are some very interesting numerical tidbits passed on. An astonishing 70% of Live users have purchased a title from the Xbox Live arcade. Nearly half of all users hit the Marketplace at least once a session. This all has to add up to good news, financially, for Microsoft; but are they overreaching? GameInformer reports on pricing for Live on Windows Vista. Gold-level service is exactly the same as on the Xbox ($19.99 for three months), while Silver is free. Encouragingly, if you're already a Gold member on the 360 the same will be true on your PC. Just the same, the company is now charging for services normally taken for granted as a freebie on the PC platform.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Charging for what was free by Froster · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't say that I'm too bothered by this. I have had all kinds of headaches with online play over the years, and if Live on Vista works as well as it does on XBOX, then its a welcome change. I think that too often game developers take the online portion of their games for granted because it doesn't generate revenue. Hopefully this is a step forward, not back.

    1. Re:Charging for what was free by Xest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem I have with it is that it's not even charging for what was free, it's charging for less than what was free - you don't get dedicated servers, game servers are hosted entirely by peers.

      When extra content from the marketplace has costs of it's own and games are hosted by the clients I have to ask what I actually get for my subscription other than access to the service? If access is all then £40 a year is an extortionate cost.

    2. Re:Charging for what was free by bigman2003 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The analogy that always come to my mind is this:

      Free online gaming is like swimming at the public park. Playing on Xbox Live is like swimming at the gym you pay for.

      There's a lot more riff-raff pissing in the pool at the park. The gym pool may not be perfect; but it's a whole lot better, simply because you are forced to pay to use it.

      For that reason alone I am willing to pay for Live, and the pool at the gym.

      --
      No reason to lie.