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.
Doddsy
But Live and PS+ are really different. You almost ‘need’ Live to use the full functionality of the 360, while PS+ is just extra stuff.
bajere
i guess thats why its called Plus/+. Its just PSN+extras. LIVE is called live as your 360 needs it to live.lol
theDAZBOMEGATRON
Aaaand in another 20 years it might pay for the RROD fiasco.
jikomanzoku
That’s an American billion not a real one then I assume.
jikomanzoku
Still an unfeasibly large pile of dough though.
carson321
almost everything you read refers to billion as an american billion, when you see the newspapers say we are so many billion pounds in debt, its still an american billion (i.e. 1000 million)
mrfodder
According to Oxford dictionaries a billion is now a thousand million in British English and the original meaning dropped.
colmshan1990
Was there snother meaning for billion? What was it?
mrfodder
A million million.
bunimomike
You have to let go of the old British million. Globally, a billion is a thousand million. Anything else will be corrected. Ah, bask in the globalisation. :-\
PoisonedMonkey
So that’s the revenue, does anyone know how much it costs to actually run the service?
If they’re making massive amounts of profit then they could massively boost their public image by shaving a few quid off an annual Gold sub.
gazzagb
Pretty impressive figures there.
C_S15
There was a Dr. Evil joke to be made here. I’m disappointed.
fps_d0minat0r
no wonder kotick wants a share, microsoft are getting all the money when call of duty has been on top 10 charts since it came out.
tinman9
Not got my cash…Free PSN online play for me.