Interestingly, the Reg recently posted an article on how many servers Microsoft own. To say the least, the stats are staggering. I know that not all the gear is used for XBL, but it does give us an insight into the hardware overhead that MS has to manage. Check this out:
"When totaled all up, you find 15 data centers with 148,357 servers, 17,406 racks and a total power consumption of 72,500KW as of Jan.
But, er, if those numbers are to be believed, then Microsoft runs about 8.5 servers per rack, which seems disheartening in this day and age of bladey goodness.
The Microsoft data centers listed are in locations such as Washington, Dublin, Singapore, Beijing and Amsterdam, Puerto Rico and Tokyo, so they do seem to cover rather global operations. And you'll find Microsoft pumping 9,000 new servers into its centers in Nov. of 2007 and another 15,000 in Jan. This matches with company claims about adding 10,000 servers a month, which should have Microsoft at about 220,000 servers today."
[http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/14/microsoft_servers_count/]
[http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080812/microsoft-enviroment-video-reveals-server-numbers-power/] - original article
OK, so it's impossible to discern what proportion of hardware runs XBL. But that's a staggering amount of power consumption, and the maintenance costs (hiring staff mostly, parts are cheap) must be huge. The actual hardware though, pays for itself very quickly, as I know from experience being a sysadmin. Looking at the stats, I'm starting to think the biggest overhead is in developing the tech eg, Trueskill etc. It works and it works well, but again once this tech is in place it's cheap to run and maintain. MS must be looking at making some substantial profits this far into the console's lifespan.
So it's worth paying the fees to fund the initial investment, from which we reap some good rewards, but surely further down the line we might expect a reduction in the fees to bring the 360 into direct competition with the PSN, Wii and PC online markets? I'm not convinced though that reducing the fees would encourage more people to go over to Gold Subscription.
