Problem’s for Xbox Live?

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Two contrasting articles have been released today regarding the issues online gamers have been experiencing with th Xbox live platform over the Christmas period.

On the bbc dot life blog the article Xbox live goes limp the focus is very much on the apparent failings of microsoft to produce a good platform for online gaming and on the way they have let down their user base. The writer seems to have an issue with Microsoft and describes this incident as following a pattern set by Microsoft and Xbox for making a mistake and then trying to make amends, in this case by offering a free game download for Xbox live users.

Yahoo News’ article reports the same story but backed up by some more statistics which paints a slightly different picture of the situation when viewed in line with the article from the BBC. In this article the writer explains that Xbox live has at present 8 million registered users and it was purely the size of the take up and usage over the holiday period which caused the outages. The success of the games Halo 3 and Mass Effect had simply pushed the Xbox Live system to its limits and slowed the system down.

These two scenarios present the situation in a completely different light from a microsoft point of view. On the one hand the first article was suggesting that maybe the Xbox live system was not all it was made out to be and that Microsoft were not as advanced as they may claim. While the second few articles show the future as being very bright for the microsoft boys and that it is simply a case of things taking off quicker than expected.

As a digital marketer I was looking at these articles and considering what they meant to in game advertising on the platform. The first one made me think, maybe it is too soon to be getting into? is the platform stable enough yet? and then after reading the next two I was in awe at the scale of the opportunity and the reachable user base. Yes, Microsoft will need to sure up their system but they should have no problems in doing that, and once they do, they can sit back and watch the user base grow and grow based on the current take up figures.