E3 is heralded as the biggest gaming event of the year, attended by journalists from all around the gaming globe, with publishers saving their latest and greatest announcements for the prestigious expo. But the event also carries with it a not so subtle underbelly. No, we’re not talking about corporate espionage, suspicious charges to escort services on company credit cards or bare skin fistfights beneath the expo stage. We’re referring to the epic cockfight that underlies every new announcement of every game.

Games are branded with a specific camp in mind, be it in Spiderman font, green lettering or recently grey-ified typeface. Hell, even multiplatform titles are showcased on one system or another in an attempt to bolster the poorly veiled grudge match that occurs weekly across the internet channels and more openly at the bigger gaming events. Whenever an opportunity rears its head, someone takes a shot across someone else’s bow. And then of course, there’s the numbers and figures that get conveniently released around about the time of a major expo.

E3 is no different in this regard, with the latest numbers from camp Sony and team Microsoft released shortly after one another. For those rooting for camp Sony, the summarised figures are as follows:

• The PlayStation Network now has 24 million members (compare to 22.73 million unit sales as of the 31st of March, 2009).
• There have been some 485 million downloads of PS3 DLC.

Now for supporters of team Microsoft:

• Xbox Live has over 20 million users (30 million unit sales as of the 28th of May, 2009).
• There have been over 1 billion downloads of Xbox 360 DLC.

Despite the argument that numbers are an objective and universal system of communication, we feel it necessary to provide a bit of context to these figures. First and foremost, it’s difficult to read either online member results as absolute, considering that the specific context of the figures was not provided. As many gamers would be aware, the PS3 has a free online service, which encourages the creation of multiple accounts. It’s not an incredible stretch of the imagination to see that the 24 million members may include multiple accounts per console (potentially inactive or rarely used accounts too).

Interestingly, Microsoft included two very provocative words in their press release; “over” and “active”. The first word (over) was used as a modifier to the number of Xbox Live users, while the second (active) was used, assumedly, to meet the pre-empted criticism of what type of user that figure actually covered. Active is still an ambiguous term however, as it could potentially include both Silver and Gold account holders, as well as original Xbox live members. In its purest sense, active should assumedly mean Xbox Live users who are Gold (paid) members and are actively involved with regularly downloading content and playing games (but even in this definition ‘regularly’ becomes a shifting term).

The numbers we find most interesting however, are those that conflict with fairly logical assumptions. The Xbox 360 has sold considerably more units than its PS3 counterpart and yet Sony has listed the PSN as having more members than its higher-selling nemesis. Again, this brings into question the issue of ‘active’ members (and what actually constitutes ‘active’ in both companies eyes), but this isn’t the only conflict of interest.

The DLC figures are of particular interest for much the same reason. Even though the PlayStation Network has considerably more members (at least, according to these numbers), they have considerably less DLC figures. With 4 million less members than Sony in the comparison, Microsoft has absolutely blitzed the 485 million content downloads with a hefty 1 billion content downloads. Again, these figures can be misleading as Sony did not specify what the 485 million downloads covered and the 1 billion Live downloads includes such things as movies and TV shows.

On a side point, it’s interesting to note that Sony has released sign-up figures for PlayStation Home. Bearing in mind that Home was the long-awaited feature that Sony believed would “be a system seller”, it’s difficult to see this in practicality when only 6.5 million people have signed up to the service. These figures are by no means miniscule, but considering that PSN is free, PlayStation Home is without charge to use and there’s 24 million PlayStation Network members, it doesn’t look to be shifting systems at this particular point in time.

The bottom line difference between the two seems to not so much be the content of their figures, but how they were announced. Microsoft released its figures by way of press release, a couple of days prior to the commencement of E3, while Sony’s figures are taken from the recent E3 Sony conference. The ability to use ambiguous phrasing and provocative language lends itself more readily to the written form, whereas spoken announcements, although usually scripted, can be misrepresented and more easily misinterpreted.

So who really won in the end? Unfortunately, the answer is still up in the air. If you want to join in the digital muscle flexing of contextually vague, ambiguous numbers you could probably pick a winner; depending on where your allegiances lie. Otherwise, the clear winner seems to be both companies at this point of time, as both sets of figures can be used to argue one particular strength or condemn an opposite’s weakness. Touché next-gen nemeses, it looks as though you’ve found a way to unite after all.