Emphasis mine.
Last I heard, you have to own a Mac to develop games for iOS, and then you have to pay a $99 fee to register as a developer. Quite prohibitive.
Please. As far as game development costs go, that’s chump change.
For a game company, yes. Then they take 30% off the top of every copy you sell. THAT is not chump change.
The poster’s concern appeared to be about the size of the online community, not the size of the install base. The point remains, Steam has more users than xbox live has users, and certainly more than Gold users, which is who can play games online.
I read about the tweet. The tweet was about the number of concurrent Xbox live user at the time. There is no mention of them ALL playing black ops.
If that’s just a total of concurrent xbox live users, I guarantee you Steam was beating that number by an order of magnitude.
That’s pretty good for publishing actually. Steam charges about the same I believe. The only way you’re going to beat that is by selling directly to users outside those store fronts, and then you won’t be moving anywhere near the numbers you would move through iTunes/Steam.
You don’t even have to buy any games on Steam to sign up for a Steam account.
You do have to buy an Xbox 360 to sign up for Xbox Live.
But the fact remains, comparing them is useless as the number of Steam accounts means jack shit as you don’t know if they’re even buying anything and the number of Live accounts means jack shit as you have no idea how many of them are Gold members.
Do Xbox 360s just idle online without playing anything? The vast majority of people on my Steam list are online, but not playing anything.
I was poking around for Steam’s percentage but couldn’t find it in the 2 minutes this question held my interest. Does anyone know this figure, as well as that of the Android marketplace and the new Windows Phone 7 marketplace?
Aren’t you automatically signed in to Xbox live when the console boots? That how mine works.
I believe that’s how it works with the PlayStation Network, too.
That’s how it works if you set it up that way when you first get the console.
But isn’t that process the default? I remember being asked to input my account details and that’s it. From then on it just logged me in. Could be I clicked… eh maneuvered and activated a check box somewhere that I didn’t notice though.
I set up my 360 a little over four years ago now, so I’m hazy on the specifics. But I believe when you input your account it asks you.
You’re right in that the vast majority don’t say no, but it is an option.