New 360 LIVE Stats

At E3 last week we got to sit down and chat with enthusiastic Xbox Live boss JJ Richards, and he was more than eager to throw his massive Xbox Live stats in our direction.

Usually these kinds of numbers are more sleep-inducing than a Horlicks and Rohypnol cocktail, but the massive numbers Microsoft has a achieved are bloody impressive.

As Richards points out, the 7 million-strong Xbox Live community is now the "biggest social network around a television".

Collectively, Xbox gamers have racked up over 2 billion hours online (that's 332,000 years), with over 2 billion game sessions initiated. 230 million of those hours were spent playing sports titles, which will please old Mr. Moore in his new EA Sports swivel chair.

Making our Gamerscore feel rather puny, Richards says the community has managed to collect over 11 billion Gamerpoints and unlock 466 million achievements. We can only wonder what kind of fans Microsoft has pointing at the Live servers. And if your head doesn't hurt yet, gamers have also managed 45 million Xbox Live Arcade downloads and a million sent messages every day. Sony has got some catching up to do, then. When it finally came to Q&A time we expectedly jumped on the opportunity to query the next Xbox Live dashboard update, which Richards told us precisely bugger all about. "We release an update every six months, right?" he said. "We're not telling you anything about what we're releasing in October/November with that next release. So between now and holiday there's actually going to be more than what we're telling you about."

[From CVG]