Xbox Live Continues to Grow
Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg talks figures, PlayStation Home, and more.
December 10, 2008 - Microsoft has released its latest round of figures touting the continued growth of Xbox Live and its large staple of downloads. With more than 14 million active members, a 66% annual increase in the number of unique visitors to Xbox Live each day, and the recent release of the New Xbox Experience, the company perhaps has good reason to be pleased with its direction. Aaron Greenburg, Director of Product Management for Xbox, chatted with IGN today about the latest numbers, PlayStation Home, and how Microsoft is preparing for the future.
With the launch of PlayStation's Home imminent, we first asked Aaron Greenberg what his personal thoughts were on Sony's online feature set:
My impression of Home is that it seems to be Second Life for hardcore gamers. It's a virtual world and I think there was some excitement around that when it was announced a couple of years ago. At that time things like Second Life and the whole virtual world phenomenon was popular. But I think it feels kind of dated a couple of years later... We looked at doing virtual worlds and really the stickiness and longevity of that type of experience was really hard to make work. That's why we invested in things like the New Xbox Experience and really integrating into the platform.
I think that's been a different approach that we've taken. We've even seen other companies like Google and their 3D world that they've since canceled. I'm not really sure that world will really thrive in the living room on the console environment but we'll have to wait and see.
From the figures released, it seems the new avatars released with the New Xbox Experience have been a pretty big hit. Uno, a game that was updated to include avatar support, saw a 650% increase in sales on the first day. A Kingdom for Keflings, the first XBLA game to fully feature avatars, had the second-best first week of sales to date on the Live Arcade. It finished behind one of the Summer of Arcade games, though Greenberg could not recall the specific title that was number one.
Greenberg went on to talk more about the success of the avatars. "It seems like now that everyone's had a chance to create their own [avatar], the people have definitely come around and are pretty excited about it. Everyone's asking us the same thing: I want more clothes! I want more options! It's good to hear that." The first wave of new avatar clothing has been released and Greenberg tells us Microsoft now has a team dedicated to that so more regular updates will be coming.
The non-games space on Xbox Live has seen growth as well. With the launch of Netflix and expansion of traditional movie and TV downloads, Xbox Live now has over 30,000 movies, TV shows and music videos. And if you haven't been fully blown away with the Netflix streaming, Greenberg promised it would improve over time with better streaming and more selections as Netflix continues to sign more partners. "They were at 10,000 when we announced with them at E3…now they're at 15,000."
Even with the popularity of Netflix, movie downloads increased by 49% and TV shows by 30% the week after the NXE launched. "That's separate from Netflix," says Greenberg," So what we're finding is that people are spending a lot more time on their Xbox 360."
What's the plan for the future? Greenberg tells us the team is not sitting back to take a breather. "The team here is very committed to rigorous innovation and continuing to add new features and new functionality over time. And I think we've proven that over the years." He also had no problem remembering the troubles Xbox Live experienced last holiday season when new owners all logged on to Xbox Live at once and brought it to its knees. "Our team has built a lot into the internal infrastructure, we've grown our operation team, increased servers and all sorts of things... We're optimistic that we'll be able to have strong performance through holiday."
Primetime is still coming in the spring. "It's a whole new category of gaming," says Greenberg. He expects the combination of games and live TV with real prizes will be a winner. We haven't seen it yet because Microsoft wants to make sure it gets it right, but it is on track.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/937/937412p1.html
