Xbox Live adds 6 Million members in a single Year, is the hate unjustified?

[Scoobes]

yo_john117 said:

Tachikoma said:

I'm sure the 6 million new members is absolutely nothing to do with the annual banwaves or the spate of new nokia lumina phones that integrate xbl features, or people just making new accounts and other such things, it's for sure just 6 million people that went out and paid full retail for a years subscription...

Really though, registration numbers mean nothing, i freaking dare you to find a person that has just one account on the ps3 or 360.

As for the argument of "is it worth it", that's entirely up to the individual, sure it would be nicer if it was free, but it is not, you either pay or you dont, if your opinion is it's crap then that's your *opinion*, there are millions of paying live members who would dissagree, just like theres millions of potential online players who wish it wouldn't cost them extra to play online.

My only issue with it is that premium services should be a 'value added service', rather than an 'added service', so here's hoping the next xbox will allow a modcrum of online functionality for games, and just reserve access to premium servers and such for gold members.

In this case though, they do mean something. When MS announces how many Xbox live users there are, they are only counting active accounts (Which I believe is any account used within the last 8 months). So any old accounts aren't counted. Most Xbox users I know only have 1 main account at a time because of the way Live accounts work (most don't want to start a new account after putting so much time and money into that account). Sure virtually everyone I know has made other alternate 1 or 3 month accounts (I have 3 of them myself from back in the Halo 3 days, nothing even remotely current though) before just as mess around accounts in CoD or Halo but those accounts aren't counted after a certain time period.

So as far as these numbers are concerned, they really are rather insightful and far from meaningless. I would reckon around 80% of the 46 million are unique accounts.

That seems like a really bizzare number of months to choose. Any idea why it's 8 months?

Personally, it'd be nice if there was some kind of industry standard when it came to reporting these numbers (doubt that's ever going to happen) so the numbers are actually somewhat comparable. For instance, Steam reports active accounts as someone that's purchased a game and has logged in in the last 30 days. Sony on the other hand just report the number of accounts accross PSN which is obviously huge.

Trying to figure out what's actually relevant is near impossible.