Microsoft is forcing X360 sales!

[Kwaad]

I'd say their servers... For 2million subscribers... would need a OC-8 line. That would cost them roughly 4,000$/month. However they are probibally backing it off their main backbone, wich is ALOT cheaper for bandwidth, so I'd say their bandwidth is less than 2,000$/month for x-box live. In terms of servers, this is where the big cost comes from. I would say they have about 500,000$ worth of servers they need to invest about 100,000$/yearly. Add in the cost of their developers. I would say they have a team of about 20 people. 20*100,000=2million. I would say x-box live costs microsoft around 2.8million/year. I would go with the conservative number of 2million gold members. (at least) so that gives them a yearly income of well over 80million. I seriously doubt they pay more than 10million/year for everything. it's a cash-cow. Why do you think sony is giving it for free? Because the advertisements will more than pay for everything. Just to let you guys know. You can make a game like WoW on a 50million USD budget. and about 500,000$/month. (including the expansion teams) 3,000,000*12= 36,000,000 / month WoW pays itself off every 2 months. Seriously guys. Bandwidth is next to free. artists/designers. Are next to free when your talking millions of subscribers. I've done alot of research in this. Microsoft is making a killing of their online service. EDIT: I just wanna say a voice server that has 64people online at once, needs roughly 5mbit up. That is the extreme tho. However if you invest in a true optical connection you can get a 100/100 for roughly 500-1000$/month. and if you wanna go crazy, you can get a OC-512 and have something like... 20gbit connection. Wich would cost you around 50,000$/month. (for an example of how much that is, you can download the internet in a matter of days) If I had a 20gbit connection, I could transfer everything off my computer in about 3minutes... if my HDD was fast enough. Bandwidth is NOT that expensive. you could always get a OC-3072, which is 159.25248 Gbps. Hey, it's new!