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

Charging for what was free

[Froster]

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.

Re:Charging for what was free

[Xest]

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.

Re:Charging for what was free

[bigman2003]

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.

Re:Gears of War made me skew the figures up...

[Xest]

Whilst you're right in that temporary accounts make the total user base figure look less impressive, the original post also states:

"An astonishing 70% of Live users have purchased a title from the Xbox Live arcade."

Which is a figure that to be fair on MS, gets more impressive when dummy accounts are taken into consideration.

A PC is not a gilded cage

[DrXym]

Microsoft can get away with that kind of shit on the XBox 360 because it is a closed system. Everything that runs on it must be approved by MS and meet their platform specifications. MS control what runs, how you buy it and how you play it. Want to chat online with your friends? Screw you pay MS. Want to set up a game? Screw you pay MS. Want to "exclusive content"? Screw you pay MS.

The same is not true on PC (much though MS would wish otherwise). There are countless online systems available, and countless ways that games use those systems or integrate with their own. I really don't see many companies being interested in this unless MS waves a big fat paycheck under their nose. The Valves, Blizzards and NCSofts of this world aren't suddenly going to dump their products just because MS is trying to muscle in. And I don't see the likes of Gamespy or XFire disappearing either unless MS engage in some extremely anticompetitive behaviour to kill them off.

In fact I see next to no reason for users to be interested either. Unless you own a 360 already and therefore get Windows Live Gold for free, where is the incentive. What is so compelling about the MS service to justify forking out $50 to use it when the same can be had for free elsewhere?