Microsoft tops 35M active Xbox Live members and 55M Xbox 360s sold

Microsoft said it has sold more than 55 million Xbox 360 video game consoles since 2005 and it now has 35 million active Xbox Live users who spend an average of 60 hours a month on the service.

Cumulatively, Xbox Live members are logging 2.1 billion hours of online gaming and other entertainment each month. Compared to a year ago, video consumption on Xbox Live is three times higher. The company made the announcement ahead of next week’s E3 trade show in Los Angeles.

In the first four months of the year, Xbox 360 has seen a 29 percent increase in sales, and it has led U.S. console sales for 10 of the past 11 months. Overall, Nintendo is still No. 1 with the Wii (around 87 million sold), Microsoft is No. 2 and Sony is No. 3 with the PlayStation 3 (50 million sold) in terms of hardware units sold.

Since November, Microsoft said it has sold more than 10 million Kinect motion-sensing systems and more than 10 million Kinect games.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To enter the Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click here.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.