New Xbox Experience A Smashing Success, Just Ask Microsoft
Home schmome, Microsoft has posted statistics regarding the success of their recent update to the Xbox Live online experience. In a cleverly timed post over on Major Nelson's blog, a few numbers are thrown around which are nothing to sneeze at.
LIVE currently has 14 million users, which is more than any city in the US, in fact, more than a few of the big ones combined. Kinda makes you feel lonely when your friends list only has six people on it, eh?
That's not to say people aren't making new friends, the addition of new gaming buddies has risen 33%. I made a new friend on my LIVE account, but I work with him so he's more of a new acquaintance.
I've been playing more games on LIVE, but many of you are watching more media, with TV and movie downloads rising 30% and 49% respectively in the week following launch
You can check out more stats by following the link at the end of the post. Call my a big old cynic, but has a new user interface really had that huge of an effect on the console? I tend to think the jump in users has more to do with a certain release the prior week, a Gears of War 2 release, if you catch my drift. Still, always good to see some positive news come out of any company this time of year. Congrats to Microsoft. Now let's see if tomorrow's release of Home on the PS3 has the same impact for Sony.
A look at a few post-NXE Xbox LIVE stats [Major Nelson]
TheDoctor
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 10 December 2008
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: major nelson, microsoft, nxe, xbla, xbox 360, xbox live
I have to say that personally, my favorite new feature is the community games. In The Pit, Biology Battle, and Weapon of Choice are all incredibly amazing games and there's a plethora of other interesting titles there as well along with more to come!
I like the idea of the new themes for this since it changes every aspect, I don't like my old themes are pretty much useless. What would be nice is the ability to get a discount on x number of themes based on how many you actually paid for before.
I personally hate the new xbl. it's cluttered with nonsense and if I could create channels the way I wanted to I could probably find something but right now I spend 10 minutes looking for where to change my theme.
I've also added 0 new friends since the launch of it, I even activated a gold card, but have yet to play anything >_
Either way Home comes tomorrow and I see myself using that more.
I agree that the NXE is cluttered and cumbersome. if I could eliminate the two or three channels which consist almost COMPLETELY of ads, I would, not to mention I'd like it to be more theme friendly. the only advantage to it over the old Blades system that I have found, is that it loads the menus quicker from in game.
I seriously wish MS gave us a choice between a pepped up Blades, and this crap, as I know I could be much happier then.
What I found interesting is the way Parties seem to be really exploding people's circle of friends. I'm not sure if this was an intended aspect of having them open to all friends by default, but I'm noticing that I'm therefore coming across more friends of friends by having them casually drop into our parties. Although I tend to close off parties if I'm specifically trying to catch up with some people or whatever, it's quite nice while just letting my brain switch off in front of UNO to come across some new people that I'm likely to not hate :)