Microsoft will make BILLIONS from Xbox Live.

[jedson328]

exindguy said:

DirtyP2002 said:

reverie said:

The sale of a 1 year Gold membership can be compared to the sale of one first party game. Nothing more or less. What I mean by this is that those Live sales are nothing different to Microsoft than the sales of Gears, Halo 3 or their other big sellers. They all have
to contribute towards reducing the losses.

 

 no.

 

1. Xbox Live has no game developer, publisher, retailer or something. Every single cent is for MS only.

Huh, I didn't know XBL built, maintained and updated itself all without the aid of programmers, product managers, and other overhead-intensive employees. I guess the rumors are true: Bill keeps a living organism chained deep within the bowels of Redmond, kept alive via some ill-understood form of osmosis that transfers the collective emotional angst of Xbox fanboys the world over into its gaping mind-maw. If only Bill could find another one to breed this one with he couldfire all the people behind Halo, Gears of War, etc. and keep all the money for himself.

There are so many factors that the ignorant and blind fail to see, such as datacenter operations, R&D, royalties(yeah thats right, when MS sells a movie or game they dont own they only get about 25% of the cut), management and administration, Internet bandwidth(huge expense  when you are looking in the OC-48/192 range), server hardware replacement and addition.  Like I said in my previous post, power and cooling probably runs them upwards of hundred million or more.  Its not like you set the service up and it just runs.

You cant expect people to understand what it takes to run system on the scale of XBL when they have no concept of IT.  Profit for XBL is probably in the tens to hundreds of millions a year, not billions.