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Revealed: Less Than 25% Of Xbox Live Users Are European
1st Aug 08
Speaking in an interview with Edge magazine, European VP Chris Lewis revealed that only 25% of its 12 million subscribers to the Xbox Live online service are European. With just 3 million users from Europe, and a large part of that being from the UK. This is because a common language is useful to playing online meaningfully, so if you don't speak English, you are a lot less likely to playing on the Xbox Live service.
Lewis admits that,
"Up until fairly recently we just haven't had enough on the service for non-English speaking folks"
He also went on to say that in France, Microsoft,
"only recently started to get figures where you've got enough French-speaking folks getting a rich enough experience to talk about it meaningfully to their friends and this is partly because of the language aspect, the fact is you need, on a community service like Live, enough people of a similar language orientation to get a community so that it starts to really blow out."
The lion's share of Xbox Live subscribers therefore reside in the USA.
Microsoft's Xbox Live service is a online community where gamers can come together to play against each other and download content such as games and movies. Two levels of the online subscription service are available; Xbox Live Silver & Xbox Live Gold. The Silver memberships comes free with the purchase of any Xbox 360 console but the Gold service is available to purchase separately. With the Xbox 360 Elite console you get a 1 month's free subscription to the Xbox Live Gold service so you can get a taste of the full online gaming experience.