Xbox Live Cracks 6 Million, Windows Cost Revealed

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.

Comments

Seems like a ripoff

[miyako]

I have an XBOX360, and a Gold membership- but the fact is that I'm probably going to cancel my membership soon, because I was thinking to myself just the other day that it's really kind of a ripoff. It's touted as an easy-to-use, unified, quality-controlled service for online play, but my experience has been quite the opposite.
I don't play online extensively, but the few times that I have tried to load up a game online, I've found that half of the time I join a "game" where no game is actually taking place, just some people standing around- or the server goes down minutes after I join. When the games do start, they have a tendency to be laggy and unreliable- since they are all hosted on home broadband connections.
Not specific to XBOX Live, but the quality of players is abysmal as well. I wouldn't mind the technical issues so much if I had ever found a friendly game- unfortunately the only people on xbox live seem to be 13 year olds who's vocabularies consist entirely of the words: ghey, pwn, fuck, and asshole.
The market place is a bit better- and worth it since you don't have to pay for the right to buy stuff from the marketplace. I've paid for a few things (mostly stuff for Oblivion), but the selection in the xbox live arcade seems overpriced and unimpressive.
I haven't tried online play with the PS3 or the Wii yet (no wii games even support online play yet AFAIK, and the only PS3 game I have that supports it so far is Resistance- I'm not about to subject myself to playing a FPS online, though I suspect that I may play Motor Storm online once I pick it up in a couple of weeks) but both have suprior online catologues IMHO. The Virtual Console has a steadily growing collection of gems which, although overpriced IMHO, are hard to overlook even if you already have the ROMS. The Wii also does the best job of any of the consoles in making online part of the experience, with integrated messaging, as well as things like the internet, everybody votes, and weather channels. The Playstation Network on the PS3 also has a few things going for it- at least I haven't found it nearly as convoluted as everyone tries to make it out to be. I've bought more for the PS3 online than for any of the other consoles- that might be because of the lack of real games for the PS3 so far- but it also seems to have the best selection of new good games at a reasonable price ($20 for tekken seemed a bit high, but $10 for GripShift and Fl0w didn' seem too bad, and $4.99 for PS1 games for the PSP isn't a bad deal, I've paid for a few of those, although I do wish that I had the option of playing them on the PS3 as well as the PSP).