Fans of online gaming on Microsoft's first console had just a few weeks to enjoy some of their favorite titles, including the beloved Halo 2. In February 2010, players learned that the service would be shut down on April 15. The time of the first Xbox and its online activity was coming to an end. A large corporation, with billions of dollars at disposal, will not endlessly fund old equipment and years of service, when huge potential profits lie in next generation. In 2006, two years after the blockbuster's release and a year after Xbox 360 arrived, Halo 2 still topped the charts of most-played games.Īll good things, however, must come to an end at some point. How crazy were they about the multiplayer? This was evidenced by the popularity rankings of games on Xbox Live. Released in November 2004, the game introduced online play to the series and quickly gathered a large and dedicated community around it.

One of the games that can be safely named the driving force behind this service and the popularizer of console online gaming, was no doubt Halo 2. In 2007 (five-year anniversary), the company reported it had reached eight million gamers with a Live subscription. Twelve months later, the number had doubled. In July 2004, Microsoft boasted one million subscribers. The service really exploded in the following years. The total play time of all users exceeded one million hours (about 114 years). As we learned in November 2002, a week after Live's launch, there had been over 5 million network sessions (an average of 500 per minute per day). In the first week after its debut, Microsoft reported, North American Xbox owners purchased one hundred fifty thousand starter packs of the paid Live service, each priced at $49.95. It was Xbox that popularized networked gaming on consoles.ĭreamcast's window was just a hint of the possibilities online gaming was essentially given its greatest momentum by Xbox Live, which went, uhm, live in 2002.

Halo 2 online dedicated server