The Xbox Live online service reached 6 million users Microsoft announced recently. The service grew to 6 million earlier than Microsoft expected. Last year at E3 they announced that they expected to double the number of subscribers from 3 million to at least 6 million by June 2007.

Considering it is March 2007 we can say that the Xbox Live service is doing extremely well ,being four months ahead of schedule. Only took 2/3 of the time they expected it to take to grab another 3 million users.

What about the rest of the numbers beyond just the users? Check it out, right from the mouth of Microsoft:

• “Xbox 360 owners have unlocked nearly 300 million achievements, for a total combined gamerscore of nearly 7.5 billion.”
• “Gamers have spent over 2.3 billion hours on the network playing games online with their friends around the world. This is equal to 95 million days of gaming or over 260,000 years. “
• “With our top title Halo® 2 being played on both the Xbox and Xbox 360, gamers have spent over 710 million hours playing online with over a half a billion games played.”
• “We are seeing an average of over 2,000,000 text and voice messages sent every day between members on the service. The average Gold subscriber has 22 friends on their friends list.”

So, with people spending over 260,000 years on Xbox Live, where are they spending it?
Halo 2 is the top game based on number of unique users followed by Gears of War and Hexic HD.
Xbox Live Arcade has also become a major hit with the Live service with almost 70% of all Xbox Live users downloading and connecting to the Arcade. 25 million downloads is just one bit of statistical data to show the Arcades success.

Just goes to show how successful Xbox Live has become. Congratulations to Microsoft for reaching another million milestone.