Is anyone going to care about EA games online if they have to cough up $10 a month to play them?

If that's the case they would be .0077% of the total console owners.

Some will, but not enough for it to be a success IMO. I don't think we'll ever see pay per play games be a success on the consoles. Systems like Live that let you play all the online games for a low fee should be fine, but I don't think many other than the most hardcore online gamers (which currently is a relatively small number in the console world) will be willing to shell out a monthly fee to play just one game online.

Maybe if EA would charge so much a month or year to play all of their games it would do better as there are so many gamers for whom EA's sports games are the main games they play.

Personally I think it will only work as long as its free. Online RPGs like Everquest or Star Wars Galaxies will get people to pay a monthly fee to play because its an entire world that they devote tons of time to, but I doubt people would pay a per game fee to play sports games online.

How do you get your math? If there's 10 million Xboxes, and 500,000 XBL accounts, that's 1/20th, or 5%, not 0.77% as you are stating...

Jeremy

I think he means 7.7% and is just denoting it incorrectly, he's using fractions and then putting a percent sign at the end.

.0077% actually is like .000077 fraction.

Check my first post, I was going for total of all console owners estimating 10 million X-box, 50 million PS2 and 5 million PS2. So it's 500,000 XBL accounts divided by 65 million.

No one will potentially boycott the EA games for lack of live support except the Live users who make up only .7% of the total owners of all consoles.

Gallant, yep, I f'ed up and forget to take the decimal points out, but it is .77 percent rather than 7.7% (.007x100).

So in sum, EA is alienating 5% of X-box users, and .77% of all console users by not supporting live. Which is no big deal and makes it silly to call them "babies" for expecting some extra incentive for MS to put a feature in their game that less that 1% of all console gamers have access to.

Your math doesn't work. your percentages can't be "of all console users" or "total owners of all consoles" - if you're going to use the figures you're using, you have to say "consoles owned" since you're going by numbers of consoles sold and you have no idea how many people own them. Plus - Xbox had 10 million consoles out there over 6 months ago, it's gotta be alot more now. Plus, I'm sure GC has more than 5 mil out there and PS2 I don't think has quite 50Mil... so to even suggest your figures are accurate is rediculous. This is all pretty pointless anyway.

You're just going through all this to argue with the fact I said they were being "babies"... it was just my interpretation of what had transpired in the meeting at E3 that took place between MS and EA as it was described to me by someone who was in attendance... this same person also agreed that MS was being stubborn and stupid and that EA was being babies. You don't like that description? Fine. Don't like it. But you're going waaaaay out of your way to try to debunk some random opinion with insane math.

Well, consoles owned is the important figure. Even if 10 people in a frat house use one PS2, they're only going buy one copy of Madden.

And I never said my figures were accurate, I clearly said they were estimates. If the console total figure is higher than 65 million as you suggested (and the offered 500,000 XBL users was right) then the percentage would be even smaller, making my point even stronger.

I wasn't going way out of my way. I estimated some numbers and did some extremely simple, middle school level math. Hardy insane.