Xbox Live is doing better than suspected
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Microsoft often brags about the number of people who have subscribed to the Xbox 360's Xbox Live service, but the company has never broken down its membership between paid and unpaid subscribers. Turns out its way better than expected. Thanks to internal Microsoft documents that were leaked to the Web recently, 60 percent of subscribers to Xbox Live in the US are paying $50 a year for the Gold membership about a year ago. Back then, there were about 10 million Xbox Live subscribers (there are 17 million now), or about 5.6 to 6 million Gold subscribers, representing about $280 million in revenues. The remaining question, of course, is what sort of revenues the rest of Xbox Live--game downloads, movies, TV shows, and other paid content-generate. Microsoft says that Xbox Live has generated $1 billion in revenues overall since 2006.