Not bad for the first week. Before launch, Microsoft was shooting for 100,000 by the end of the year. Here is the press release:

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/tic...122&ID=2128001

Some interesting snipets from the article:

Great news, hopefully this will help quikly expand the library of Live enabled titles.

Beautiful!

Man, I was going to wait til next year to pick up Live, but with so many out there I might have to pick it up for some NFL2K3 games

I must say I am very surprised by the turnout.

I'll be the first to say I may have been wrong about this "internet thingie".

That's impressive but not surprising, considering all the stores in my area are sold out of XBL.

Jeremy

<SMALL>said by planetxbox:</SMALL><HR>
Xbox Live, Selling Out
Friday, November 22, 05:32 | Talon |
Xbox Live is popular; it appears to be the understatement of the century today as Microsoft has officially announced that over 150,000 Xbox Live Starter Kits during its first week of availability. The service, which is the first broadband service to surpass 100,000 subscribers, has serviced over 200,000 gamers due to its multiple players on one account feature since release. As a result of the player figures, Microsoft also put forth a few small points of order. First of which being that players have completed more than 5 million games, 500 games per minute, played more than 1 million hours of gameplay (or 114 years) in a week, and more than all games played in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB combined.
Due to the strong sales of the Starter Kits, Microsoft continued to announce that all retail outlets have sold out, but that new shipments are on the way and will continue to ship throughout the holiday season. Moreover, Microsoft stated that Xbox Live-enabled game sales shot up 120 percent during the week, with Xbox hardware sales jumping 18 percent week-over-week.<HR>

www.planetxbox.com


/me only wishes xbox live would make it to Israel....

I'm in shock!



I'm ok now, but that's still amazing!

Somehow I missed this thread, and started one with the same information. So I just deleted that one, and came in here to repeat...

I always thought 100,000 subscribers by the end of this holiday was far too conservative a number. MS executives probably did not want to burn themselves again with completely unrealistic projections, a la the projected sales of Xbox itself in its early months.

It was amazing back then that everybody on a gaming messageboard knew they'd have no shot at meeting those number, yet MS set itself up for an awful early impression in the public eye. This time, all these "extra" Live kits sold can be trumpeted in every PR release and every news story about Xbox during the Christmas shopping season.

I agree, very smart move on Microsoft's part. Still, 200,00 is quite impressive.

It would be interesting to find out how many xboxs have been sold in North America? What percentage have broadband connections?

I am not surprised they can hit that kind of number.

so $50 times 400,000 equals $20 million revenue on 1 billion invested in the Live network. They need to get to the millions range to have a chance to make money.

I think they will top out at around 400,000 number myself although I guess we will see. I also think next year is key since people will have to renew and pay again.

Sony is estimating they had hit 200,000 network adapters sold also and are shooting for a 400,000 sell thru rate in the North American market also. however since they have no network expenses they can make money using these numbers.

I guess MS is expecting to make up the loses on the next console since the majority of the infrastructure of the network might be useable.

I guess how impressed you are depends on what your expectations were and what perspective you're looking at it from. I do agree that MS downplayed their expectations a bit because they certainly couldn't afford another perceived failure.

If you read their press release, they state 150K XBox Live units sold. That almost certainly includes beta testers who bought their beta kits but were shipped the retail package when it became available. If memory serves, an earlier press release touted the number of XBox Live testers at 100K, but I'm not sure if that's the number of people who signed up or the number of people who actually ponied up the $50. So actual new sales since launch could be as little as 50K or as high as probably around 100K.

Anyway, the 200K number is the 150K paid subscribers plus, I guess 50K "guest accounts." I'm not sure if they've changed their policy on it, but I thought guest accounts didn't get an actual gamertag (you can name yourself, but that name isn't persistent and MS doesn't keep records for you). Seems a bit of a stretch to me to include that in the number you're trying to pass off as "installed base."

Also, this statement in the release is just precious:

" Virtually every Xbox Live Starter Kit at retail locations across the United States and Canada has sold out in less than one week of availability, but new shipments of Starter Kits are already on retail shelves and will be replenished throughout the holiday season."

Are they saying that the kits are sold out everywhere? No. Nobody is having any trouble getting them. They're just saying that most stores have sold out of their initial shipment which isn't at all surprising or impressive if you consider that most stores aren't going to order more than a week or two (at most) of inventory. Of course that statement got it's desired effect. There's plenty of fan sites and even some respectable news sites that have headlined the story "XBox Live Sold Out Everywhere."

Personally, I'm not impressed by the numbers for either Sony or Microsoft's online launches. Even if all three console makers together garner over 1 million online players by early next year, that'd still only be somewhere around 5% of their total installed base. At this point it doesn't appear as if online console gaming is going to become mainstream in this generation.

XBox Live sold out everywhere? Funny, everywhere I go I see stacks of them sitting out.

Incorrect. Beta testers made up about 35,000 people before launch. That comes straight from the announcements board at XBox.com. That means 115,000 people bought the retail kit.

Cool, like I said, I wasn't sure if the 100K number they were tossing around earlier referred to people who signed up or people who actually bought the beta. I was guessing that if it was the latter case, then maybe half of the people who signed up ended up buying it. I guess the truth was that only one third did.

Anyway, it's just all marketing spin. Sony and Nintendo do it too, so I'm not necessarily singling MS out.

BTW, if you work out the averages, in that one week, each player spent over 5 hours playing about 25 games. That's about 42 minutes and 3.5 games completed per day.

OMG! Xbox Live is doomed!

Read the press release a little more closely and you'll notice that they mention that stores have already been resupplied...

This is before the resupply - I first saw them out the day after release, then a few days ago still appeared to be original supply due to the amount left out. I would say there's quite the healthy supply of LIVE kits, unlike PS2 BBA's, and the almost nonexistant GC BBA's. A few people I was talking to at Blockbuster were surprised when they said they've searched "everywhere" for the BBA's for those two systems, and then I told them that both Target and Wal-Mart had a few of each just sitting there - I guess no one thinks to look there.

200,001 as of monday. Who wants to get some hoops on?

That's more than I was expecting.

Anyone know what number they need to hit to be profitable? Well I mean, anyone have a decent guess. Obviously no one outside of MS will have a clue as to the actual number.

XBOX is ROCK

Without even looking at the numbers, just speaking as someone who's been part of the experience for the past month, I feel Xbox Live is the beginning of something really big. Sure it's got it's little problems here and there but if this is any indication of where console gaming is headed, then the fun is just beginning. Sure there's been online gaming on the PC for years and DC & PS2 had online stuff first, but not like this. IMO, Xbox Live is the start of the next generation of console gaming and it's what all future consoles will be looking to mimic or beat. And in the long run, it's Xbox Live that will be on top just because of Microsoft's commitment and experience with successful online stuff (msn, zone.com, etc), and the fact that by the time the other consoles catch up, XBL will already have the user base and the Live games on a network that's been up and running longer.

Maybe we'll get to see AOL of PS2 soon?

Microsoft did a very impressive job with Live. They really showed the other console(s) (not sure if I should coun the cube or not since they really had no online plan) how an online network should be done.

Who pays for the Sony games that offer free Internet like SOCOM?

150,000 huh. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but that is only around 1.5% of people that own an XBox. 150,000 isn't as staggering when you look at it that way.

Now had they shipped it with Halo 1.5, the numbers would be around 70% of their installed user base. I personally think they botched XBL for launch. Do we include a game? Yes. No, wait maybe some demos would be better, no wait a game, no demos...... Now when Halo 2 comes around, there will be a surge in XBL. But until then, I agree with above statement of XBL maxing out around 400,000. That is a good number. Just my thoughts.

Sony is paying however the expense is smaller than what MS is trying to do.

MS needs to make sure that every game can go thru their servers so all the bandwidth goes thru them first as well as MS testing every game before it is released to make sure it is compatible with the Live network(the main reason why EA is not on board).

Then some games will be passed to external servers and some will stay on MS's servers.

sony has none of these worries. The specific developers will configure the game for it's own servers.

Sony only needs to deal with bandwidth for their games.

at $50 dollars a year divided by a 4 year remaining lifespan they need 5 million users to break even this generation. 2.22 million users the whole time if they break even at the end of the 5 year life span of the XBox 2.

They can reduce the time by going to a monthly charge and making it $10 a month. This will get them to $50 first year then $120 per year for the remaining three years or $410 VS $200 for a $50 yearly model. This gets the break even point down to 2.43 million for the first 4 years and $1110 vs $450 including the XBox2 5 year lifespan they get down to 900900 users which is a more attainable number. Of course this assumes they have this number paying the whole time and they do not invest one dime above 1 billion dollars for the whole 9 years.

Frankly in my opinion they will never make money on the online model spending that much, but then MS can afford to lose a few billion here and there and not notice it.