Xbox Live Tops A Billion

Bloomberg, via MCV, yesterday reported that Xbox Live may have made $1 billion last financial year. It seems that Microsoft were talking subscription figures with the financial news service, and revealed that last year 25 million people paid for a Xbox Live Gold subscription, certainly some very impressive figures for the service. When you plug the cost of a subscription into the equation that comes out a cool $600 million netted by the Seattle giant.

What’s that you say? $600 million is $400 million less than $1 billion? Luckily my highly tuned journalistic brain also spotted this discrepancy, and read on. In combination with the big chunk of change earned from subscription fees Dennis Durkin, COO of Xbox and someone I’ve never heard of before, announced that for the first time ever Xbox Live made more money from content than subscriptions. So that means at least another $600 million in revenues. Now along with journalism my brain is also capable maths, although I get a bit lost when people start using letters. What? Are numbers not good enough for you?

Anyway, take $600 million and add another $600 million and you get $1.2 billion as the minimum number for Xbox Live’s revenue last year. Sadly, Durkin doesn’t give any indication of how much more than subscriptions content generated, or how much of that revenue was profit, but still $1.2 billion in revenues is pretty impressive by most standards.

Of course, we don’t have much in the way of comparison as I can’t find any figures for the PSN and Valve doesn’t need to publish any revenue figures if they don’t feel like it. However, these kind of numbers are a clear indication as to why Sony wanted in on the subscription model.