It’s been a little over a month since Microsoft launched Xbox Live in Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and they have now reached 50,000 units.
The North America service was launched in November 2002 and they make up the vast majority of the current 350,000 Global users, who are playing more than three million game sessions per week. Amazingly the US users are spending an average of 2.5 hours per day Live gaming with the peak gaming times being during television prime time.
There are currently 11 Xbox Live-compatible games and 2003 will see the launch of more than 50 Xbox Live-enabled games, but it isn’t clear if the games will be including online playing or just the less interesting, but popular, content download. A while back “MechAssault“, from Microsoft Game Studios, had more than 172,000 downloads during the first week of availability — more than half of the registered users.
The new Xbox Live games for release over the next two months are as follows:-May 2003
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Lucas Arts) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content
- Godzilla (Infogrames) – Downloadable Content
- MotoGP 2 (THQ) – Multiplayer
- Phantasy Star Online (Sega) – Multiplayer
- Burnout 2 (Acclaim) – Online Scoreboards
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Activision) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content
June 2003
- Midtown Madness (Microsoft Games Studios) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content
- Midnight Club 2 (Take2 Interactive/Rockstar) – Multiplayer
- Brute Force (Microsoft Games Studios) – Downloadable Content