By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close

Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Microsoft will make BILLIONS from Xbox Live.

jedson328 on 26 June 2008

Unfortunately, it will also cost them billions to run the service due to rising energy and cooling costs for datacenters. Do they make money? Yes. Is it much as you think? LOL, no.



Bethesda's Todd Howard "if install base really mattered, we'd all make board games, because there are a lot of tables."

Feel free to add me ...

PSN ID - jedson328
XBL Gamertag - jedson328

 

Around the Network
exindguy on 26 June 2008
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.




Stats87 on 26 June 2008

Woohoo! YES! Hoowah!

wait...

*checks to see if he owns stock in Microsoft*

nevermind



jedson328 on 26 June 2008
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.



Bethesda's Todd Howard "if install base really mattered, we'd all make board games, because there are a lot of tables."

Feel free to add me ...

PSN ID - jedson328
XBL Gamertag - jedson328

 

EggsWithLegs on 26 June 2008

Hundreds of millions amount to billions eventually - which was Squilliam's point!



Around the Network
Random Person B on 26 June 2008

paying for online gaming, how did you console owners let companies get away with this >.>



JaggedSac on 26 June 2008

Same way MMOs get away with it.



Strategyking92 on 26 June 2008
pimpcoop said:

Why can't Nintendo do something like this. I would not mind paying 60 bucks a year to play online. They will have the money to run all of those servers and they could also use the money they make to improve the crappy online they have now!!!

 

 ......................... what.

First I hear wii/ps3 owners complaining about lives service cost, and now this guy... I am utterly confused.



And that's the only thing I need is *this*. I don't need this or this. Just this PS4... And this gaming PC. - The PS4 and the Gaming PC and that's all I need... And this Xbox 360. - The PS4, the Gaming PC, and the Xbox 360, and that's all I need... And these PS3's. - The PS4, and these PS3's, and the Gaming PC, and the Xbox 360... And this Nintendo DS. - The PS4, this Xbox 360, and the Gaming PC, and the PS3's, and that's all *I* need. And that's *all* I need too. I don't need one other thing, not one... I need this. - The Gaming PC and PS4, and Xbox 360, and thePS3's . Well what are you looking at? What do you think I'm some kind of a jerk or something! - And this. That's all I need.

Obligatory dick measuring Gaming Laptop Specs: Sager NP8270-GTX: 17.3" FULL HD (1920X1080) LED Matte LC, nVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, Intel Core i7-4700MQ, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3, 750GB SATA II 3GB/s 7,200 RPM Hard Drive

jedson328 on 26 June 2008
EggsWithLegs said:

Hundreds of millions amount to billions eventually - which was Squilliam's point!

 

Its likely closer to tens of millions. :)



Bethesda's Todd Howard "if install base really mattered, we'd all make board games, because there are a lot of tables."

Feel free to add me ...

PSN ID - jedson328
XBL Gamertag - jedson328

 

whatever on 26 June 2008

Umm, hasn't MS been charging for this since the original xbox launched? So they've had this model for 7 years, and yet somehow this will suddenly turn into some huge profit maker?

With energy prices soaring, it will cost more & more to run the servers. I can see them losing money if they don't raise the price.