Xbox Live reaches six million users

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 07 March 2007 00:52

Your IT - Entertainment

Xbox Live now has over six million members worldwide, a milestone Microsoft didn't expect to reach until June.

What we don't know is how many of them have a free Silver account and how many have bought Gold membership.

Silver members get access to Xbox Live Arcade, voice chat, text messaging and friends lists.

A Gold subscription allows use of online multiplayer games (including the TrueSkill feature for matching players with similar overall skills) and chatting to more than one other member at a time.

Gold subscriptions cost $US59.99/$A99.95 (retail boxed product, includes Xbox 360 headset and other items), $US49.99/$A79.95 (online or prepaid subscription card).

Other statistics released by Microsoft include the fact that members have spent 2.3 billion hours playing Live games since 2002 and send over two million voice and text messages per day.

So what are the most popular Live games? Halo 2, Gears of War, and Hexic HD.

And Live Arcade games? Arcade, UNO and Bankshot Billiards are the top downloads. Over 70 percent of members have purchased at least one game from Live Arcade.

Microsoft recently announced a 512M Memory Unit for the Xbox, allowing the storage of more and larger Live Arcade games, which can now be as big as 150M rather than the previous 50M limit that applied when the 64M Memory Unit was the only option.

Australian and New Zealand Silver members are being granted free Gold access this weekend. Sponsored by Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, the complimentary period runs from 3pm on Friday March 9 to 11.59pm on Sunday March 11.