Stringer: PSN hits 60 million users

[smbu2000]

ArnoldRimmer said:

Counti said:

LivingMetal said:

It’s worth noting that rival Microsoft also lifted the cloth on numbers for its Xbox LIVE service, confirming it’s raked in 30 million users to date.

But you can't compare the sony and ms numbers here, cause sony counts every account ever made (including accounts that wont be used anymore; read that somewhere) and microsoft only active ones.

Good point, but that's a general problem: how do you define "active" users of an online service?

Since you can never know if the user of an online account comes back or not, "active" in practice always means "has logged on at least once within the last XY days". But there is no common standard for XY, so companies are likely to pick a large value for XY so it seems that they have more "active" accounts.

It's obvious that 60 million is far from the real number of REALLY ACTIVE PSN users. The number of REALLY ACTIVE XBL users is a little easier to estimate: Microsoft recently revealed that there are about 30 million active XBL users, of which about 13 million (if I remember correctly) are gold memberships. Since XBL is rather pointless without a gold membership, the real number of active XBL users is probably much closer to 13 than to 30 million, and the other 17 million are probably people who only tried out XBL.

That 13 million figure for Gold memberships was when they previously stated total memberships at 25 million. It's most likely increased since then.

Just because somebody isn't a gold member doesn't mean they're not active. My gf is only a silver member, but that's because she doesn't play any 360 games online, only singleplayer or offline co-op games, so there is no need for her to have a gold membership. I even offered to buy a gold membership for her, but she said that she doesn't need it.