Microsoft Rumored To Buy Second Life 223
Jamie noticed a rumor making the rounds: Microsoft buying Second Life. Nobody is confirming or denying anything, much less announcing anything sounding like a price. Or a reason why this makes any sense to anyone.
Why would MS do this? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm betting Microsoft is seeing the money they can make from furries.
I had an SL avatar, ran it into a furry hangout, oh look, a stripper pole. I get on it, leave to take care of something that needed urgent attention, come back and I've suddenly got the equivalent of $50USD.
I didn't do a damned thing and made $50. Furries are unusually un-thrifty with their money, it seems.
Re:15-20 Million PS3 Home Users (Score:3, Informative)
MS has 25 million live subscribers. @ $50 each, that's $1.25bil.
I'm no expert in Xbox Live, but your cited article [bloomberg.com] doesn't match your figures. It says that only half the 25 million users paid the $50 Gold subscription:
Microsoft says about half the service's 25 million users paid an annual fee to play games online like "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" in the year ended June 30. That would be about $600 million.
So rather than $1.85 billion dollars of sales that you estimate, it is more like $1.2 billion that your article estimates. Still nothing to be laughed at. I can only assume that the grandparent poster meant to say was that the Xbox Live service was laughed at by Playstation gamers. Which they would, I suppose.
Re:Fanbois are out tonight (Score:3, Informative)
The eyetoy/eye predates the Wii, and Sony was working on that wand controller in the PS2 days, they even had prototypes. Didn't release it because the tech wasn't quite there yet. IIRC the limitation was the original eyetoy's resolution and the PS2 wasn't quite powerful enough to do what they wanted with it AND put out pretty graphics while processing the video.
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Informative)