Long Live Xbox Live
November 3rd, 2005, By Duncan Gough
As well all know, digg.com is the new slashdot. Well, most people seem to wish that were the case.
Of course, I’m not going to let this slashdot persecution stop me from reading it. In fact, since digg.com has arrived, the quality of some of the comments on slashdot has improved. It might have something to do with the fact that I browse at +5. It might also have something to do with the fact that digg.com doesn’t offer any filtering of comments. Moderation and meta-moderation are key to the success of slashdot.
Anyway, this comment piqued my interest. Not least because I whole-heartedly agree with it:
Number of PS2's sold: 90 million Number of Xboxes sold: 24 million Number of subscribers to Xbox Live: ~2 million Amount of revenue MS has generated from the Xbox, Xbox Live, and Xbox games: -$4 billion (that's negative four billion dollars)
Xbox 360 has several things going for it but a whole lot more things going against it. Starting with the awful name. If MicroSoft intends to build a gaming community on Xbox 360 they are going to run into many, many problems. There’s a reason why Sony is holding back from that on the PS3, as they did with the PS2. Time will tell, but online play is extremely hard to do well. Naturally, it’s extremely easy to do poorly too.