Xbox Live Gold
 |
|
| Developer | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Type | Online service |
| Launch date | November 15, 2002 |
| Platform |
Xbox (Discontinued as of April 15, 2010) Xbox 360 Xbox One Windows XP – Windows 7 as (Games for Windows – Live) Windows 8/8.1/10 (full integration) Windows Phone iOS Android |
| Status | Online |
| Members | 55 million |
| Website | www |
| Developer | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Type | Premium online service |
| Platform |
Xbox 360 Xbox One |
| Website | US website |
Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft. It was first made available to the Xbox system in November 2002. An updated version of the service became available for the Xbox 360 console at the system's launch in November 2005, and a further enhanced version was released in 2013 with the Xbox One.
The service was extended in 2007 on the Windows platform, named Games for Windows – Live, which makes most aspects of the system available on Windows computers. Microsoft has announced plans to extend Live to other platforms such as handhelds and mobile phones as part of the Live Anywhere initiative. With Microsoft's mobile operating system, Windows Phone, full Xbox Live functionality is integrated into new Windows Phones that launched since late 2010. The service shut down for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010, and original Xbox Games are now only playable online through local area network (LAN) applications such as XLink Kai.
The Xbox Live service is available as both a free and subscription-based service, known as Xbox Live Free and Xbox Live Gold, respectively, with most features such as online gaming restricted to the Gold service.
As Microsoft developed the original Xbox console, online gaming was designated as one of the key pillars for the greater Xbox strategy. Sega had made an attempt to capitalize on the ever-growing online gaming scene when it launched the Dreamcast video game console in 1999, including online support as standard, called SegaNet and Dreamarena. Nevertheless, due to lack of widespread broadband adoption at the time, the Dreamcast shipped with only a dial-up modem while a later-released broadband adapter was neither widely supported nor widely available. Downloadable content was available, though limited in size due to the narrowband connection and the size limitations of a memory card. The online features, while praised as innovative, were largely considered a failure, and the Dreamcast's immediate competitor, the PlayStation 2, did not initially ship with built-in networking capabilities.
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