Pachter: Xbox division on fire, Xbox Live is wildly profitable

[DirtyP2002]

Slimebeast said:
Personally I estimate that a little over 50% of X360 owners are connected to Xbox Live, and these are the 20 or 23 million, but only a lil over half of these actually pay for Gold.

So maybe there are a little more than 10 million Gold members who pay $35 on averge per year (see Squill's estimation for the $35).

So I beleive the total revenue is no more than ~$400mill annually from xbox Live subscriptions.

The 23 million live users-number is 5 months old though (CES 2010). And I think it leaked that about 60% of the users are gold members.

• I think the Halo Reach Beta with 2.7 unique users (and just ranked on no. 6 on the weekly XBL charts)
• The best selling MW2 mappack
• The great sales for Battlefield Bad Company 2 (2.17 million so far)
• The 600k players that played Halo 3 in the past 24 hours (!!!)
• The 1600 point card being the BEST sellinge acessory in the US for two months in a row according to NPD

All of that really shows that Xbox Live really is massive. I think 13 million paying members is easily possible.

And Squill's estimation:

$35 might be right, nobody knows for sure except MS. But consider this:

1. exchange rates ( I pay up to 60€ for one year = $73)

2. You calculated everybody bought the cheapest subscription for one year and nobody bought 3 months subscriptions or something like that. The 3 months XBox Live gold card is more expensive for one year.

 

I can't wait what might be next for Xbox Live. E3 will show us some new features that will drive the Xbox Live sales. Twitter, Facebook, Sky, Canal +, Netflix, Last.FM, Zune marketplace are really nice features. Imagine what a partnership with ESPN could be like... For Xbox Live, sky is the limit.