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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwistedBishop" data-source="post: 2268536" data-attributes="member: 12503">True enough.  However, it's a service that's very new to consoles.  That it's captured 10% of its user base in how many years, two?, makes the future look bright for it.  How many people played video games in 1985?  How many play them now?  Markets do take time to saturate.I've always seen three things going against Live on Xbox1:-You had to go out of your way to get it.  A problem solved by the 360.  (The automatic Silver service reminds me a lot of the way AOL flooded every portion of your life with installation discs and pre-installations. Probably not the best association, but it's hard to deny how well it has worked.)-The need of a router.  They missed the ball on this one.  How hard would it have been to give the 360 pass-through connections?-A limited scope of play.  Honestly when I think online play, I think of mostly one thing: tournaments.  You're never going to hook a huge percentage of the gaming demographic on free-for-all fragfests long-term.  But prize-based competition, that's gaming gold.  (I'm into a lot of Magic Online, where people pay vastly larger sums than $5 a month to compete.)  Live has been taking steps in the right direction with this lately.  Last summer they held a Ninja Gaiden championship, and at the press conference they mentioned holding more such events.  There's also the more universal market of downloadable content, which I can see drawing a lot of people in.  They've been smart to push that lately, and I'm sure it will only increase with the 360.These are two worlds colliding, online gaming and console games.  I don't think it will be an easy road for Microsoft, and certainly that 1 billion users in a year thing isn't going to happen.  But to write the whole thing off as a niche market, because it didn't capture half the playerbase immediately, seems shortsighted.  Of course, if this sounds like a lot of fanboy raving from a Live player, I should mention that I don't even use the service currently.  It was always more trouble than it seemed worth to get it, especially when I hated Quake-ish fragfests.  The fact is, the 360 is looking like it will solve all my problems with the Live service, aside from the router.  If it's doing that for me, it's going to do it for a huge percentage of the player base not interested in Live at the moment.  Technically all 360 owners will be Live-enabled, but as far as actually plugging your box into a broadband connection, I'd be very surprised if at least 75% don't hook up to it.</blockquote>

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