Leaked Documents Shed Light On Microsoft's Xbox Live's Revenues
This story was written by Tameka Kee.
*Microsoft* is known for keeping its paid subscriber stats for Xbox live close to its vest, so when the company said it had topped the 17 million subscriber mark during back-to-back presentations at CES, it was hard to put a financial value on that. Ditto when it said it added three million new subscribers in Q4.
But a new report from the Seattle P-I, based on a leaked Excel spreadsheet detailing Xbox Live's paid subscriber stats for early 2008, sheds a bit of light on this black box: The report found that 60 percent of Xbox Live members in the U.S. were paying either an annual, three-month or monthly fee to use the service last February; worldwide subscriptions were slightly lower at 56 percent. Xbox Live had about 10 million subscribers at the time, according to a company release during CES 2008so even if those 5.6 million paid users were at the lowest price (about $50 for the year), they would've represented about $280 million worth of revenue. Of course, that's not taking into account the three-month or monthly subscribers, or discount cards from retailers like *Amazon.com*but it's still not a drop in the bucket.
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has always maintained that a significant number of its subscribers were at the pay-to-play "Gold" level as opposed to the free "Silver"which makes sense, given that online play is only available to Gold-level members; it also said gamers have spent more than $1 billion on Xbox Live since its inception in 2006. But stats on how much of that was for downloadable games versus subscriptions would offer a better read on how viable the paid-subscription model could be to rivals like Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Nintendo, which currently offer online play for free.
Photo Credit: Adam
By Tameka Kee