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GDC: Microsoft Announces 6 Million Xbox Live Users
by Simon Carless
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March 6, 2007
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Based in China with over 400 staff, Virtuos is one of the largest providers of outsourced production services
to the games industry, specializing in 3D Art, Animation, Co-development, Engineering and QA.
Its international
management team is led by Gilles Langourieux former Founder and Managing Director of Ubisoft China Studios and
backed by Legend, the number one IT group in China. Since its creation in late 2004, Virtuos’ clients include
leading developers as well as 14 of the top 20 games publishers worldwide.
Website: http://www.virtuosgames.com
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In a GDC-timed announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that more than 6 million gamers worldwide are using Xbox Live for the Xbox 360, a milestone reached 4 months ahead of the company's June 2007 goal, also revealing a multitude of new Xbox 360-related statistics.
According to the company, more than 10 million Xbox 360s have hit store shelves since launch in November 2005, with the console now available in 37 countries. The overall software attach rate for Xbox 360 is 5.1 titles per console in the United States, with an accessory attach rate of 2.9 units per console.
After confirming that more than 6 million people are 'members' of Xbox Live, presumably including those who have connected to the network either as Xbox Live Silver or Xbox Live Gold participants, Microsoft followed up with some specific stats relating to the online service.
Gamers have spent over 2.3 billion hours on the network playing games online, equal to 95 million days of gaming or over 260,000 years. In the company's top title, Halo 2, which is being played on both the Xbox and Xbox 360, gamers have spent over 710 million hours playing online with over a half a billion games played.
In addition, Microsoft is seeing an average of over 2,000,000 text and voice messages sent every day between members on the service, and the average Xbox Live Gold subscriber has 22 friends on their Xbox Live friends list. To date, Xbox 360 owners have unlocked nearly 300 million Achievements. All of those unlocked Achievements have created a total combined Gamerscore of nearly 7.5 billion.
Moving on to the Xbox Live Marketplace, more than 70 percent of Xbox Live members are downloading content from Marketplace, driving more than 135 million downloads since the launch of Xbox 360. More than 5 Billion points (around $40 million at U.S. point prices) have been activated on Marketplace to date. Nearly 50% of Xbox Live members in the U.S. log into Xbox Live Marketplace every time they turn on their console.
Finally, the Xbox Live Arcade service has now surpassed 25 million downloads, and Microsoft released a list of the top XBLA titles by amount of full downloads, as follows:
1. Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting
2. Bankshot Billiards 2
3. Marble Blast Ultra
4. UNO
5. DOOM
[UPDATE: 03/09/07, 7am PST - Microsoft corrected its software attach rate from 4.6 to 5.1 - the previous figure provided to Gamasutra was incorrect.]
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