Wait... Are people seriously flipping out over 1b dollars in REVENUE annually in 4 years time?

Single games, like Guitar Hero III, Rock Band and Wii Fit, do 1b dollars in revenue. An entire games platform generating 1b annually... And it's 4 years off, by this guy's estimate? I don't see that as a big deal AT ALL.

Erik - which of those games reached 1 billion in revenue?

I'm pretty sure that they mean profit...

And a game to make 1 billion revenue needs to sell 16,666,666 copies at a $60 pricetag.  so 1 billion is impressive if its revenue and just plain sick if its profit they are talking about.  And their is no game that has ever made 1 billion in profits, it would need to sell about a hundred million copies at a sixty dollar price range....so yeah 1 billion dollars is damn impressive!

http://www.edge-online.com/news/research-xbox-live-generate-1b-annually

"Micosoft’s Xbox Live service will clearly lead" competitors Sony and Nintendo in the online console gaming space, generating over $1 billion in online revenues annually by 2013, according to the latest research from In-Stat.

Revenue.

Wii Fit I'm sure will do $1b for this year. WoW does $1b a year. For their lives, Rock Band and Guitar Hero III have both done $1b total, and as a franchise, I'm sure both do in the $1b annual range.

These are not $60 games, but nonetheless.

I'm not bashing MS here... This is just some dude's estimate, afterall. I just don't think it would be particularly impressive.

So WoW does it, and Wiifit...and that's not impressive company to be held in?  Your talking about a better than Halo 3 performance every year...from 2013 onward...and that's not impressive?  Sometimes, I really wonder....

10,000,000 users who spend $100 annually = $1 billion
or perhaps
15,000,000 users who each spend on average $67 = $1 billion

Jesus. Thats alot of revenue from an online service. It is a smart business move to have subscriptions. But also the amount of movies in HD and SD to download or stream on Live now is amazing. Also the amount of game content on there is quite staggering compared to the competition. They have done tremendously well. You cant knock M$ business sense.

Too bad most of the profit made from xbox goes to repairing broken consoles. I don't know this for sure, but has Microsoft ever made profit for xbox and xbox360? I mean total profit here.

Anyway, it was a very smart decision from m$ to let people pay a subscription :)

Is there any need for that? Cant you just say congratulations?

The xbox was a big money loser, but the 360 is right as rain...wrt to the repair cost M$ took the hit a few years ago to the tune of a bln $$$...so I'm not sure what cost you are talking about?