Xbox Live More Popular than iTunes?

Microsoft announced this morning that they'd reached 10 Million downloads with the new Xbox Live service, a download rate even faster than the iTunes Music Store. From the Gamespot article: "The tech giant also revealed that more content for Xbox Live is on the way. The company confirmed that new achievements and automobiles will be available for Project Gotham Racing 3, new multiplayer maps are headed to Perfect Dark Zero, and an online cooperative mode for Kameo: Elements of Power will be ready soon. The company did not say whether said downloads would be free or, as is more likely, come at a price."

Yay inflammatory titles

[Ryan J. Evans]

Talk to me when XBL has a billion downloads...

Apple iTunes downloads passes 1 billion songs [apple.com]

(Disclaimer: I use and like both itunes and XBL, but saying that something that just hit 10m downloads is more popular than something that just passed 1b is ridiculous.)

same as iTunes

[morcheeba]

The XBOX360 has been out for 4 months now -- that's the same amount of time it took iTunes to sell 10 million songs [apple.com]. But, Xbox has been released world-wide -- at that time, iTunes hadn't launched in europe yet [usatoday.com] and was only available to rabid mac owners. [bbc.co.uk]

Even worse than that

[Anonymous Coward]

They aren't talking about how "popular" the services are, in terms of number of users. They're talking about the rate of growth for the a six month period of service. But it's not the same six month period of service! They're comparing the sales in the first six months of the iTunes Music Store, to the downloads in the first six months of XBox 360, even though the XBox Live game purchasing service was available for a full year and a half before the XBox 360 came out!

So: iTunes, we look at the number of downloads over that first six month period from day one's surprise launch, when the product was brand new and the market itself had essentially only just been freshly invented.

The XBox Live, we're looking at the number of downloads between months eighteen and twenty-four of operation, once the concept has been established and well-publicized for a long time, Nintendo and Sony are six months from getting essentially identical products to market, and beginning immediately after the release of a massive hardware revision which basically lead to every enthusiastic early adopter getting on the XBox Live Marketplace at the same time-- because there were no good retail games yet.

It seems to me you have to construe these numbers in a very complicated fashion before they start to appear impressive for Microsoft.