Consoles' online numbers compared.

[MinisterofDOOM]

The Diffusion Group did a study into numbers of online-connected consoles.

The PS3 leads by a small margin, with 78% of installed consoles connected to the intertruck.360 is a very close second, at 73%And the Wii's a distant third at 53%

I own all 3, and all 3 are net-connected.

[ProudNissanFreak]

Only gots a PS3 and Wii. PS3 is connected, never bothered with the Wii except for when I tried to play Super Smash online and nobody was there.

[RCA]

I to have all three connected to the net.

I play my Xbox 50%, my PS3 45% and Wii 5%

[Otto.]

My 360 is connected and my Wii is downstairs collecting dust because I only have one game for it.

[Alfador]

I'm curious as to, of the total number of ALL consoles connected to the net, which one had the most. I would suspect that most consoles connected to the web overall are 360s. They seem to work the hardest at marketing the online experience as a part of it, even though silver is pretty useless. While the wii is incredibly popular, and it has built in wifi, I just don't see people bothering with that portion of it.

[MinisterofDOOM]

Yeah, I'd like to see that as well. The 360's much larger install base should put it on top as far as total numbers overall.

I did see an interesting statistic that shows that there are only half as many Xbox live accounts (20 million) as PSN accounts (40 million), but I'd attribute that to three things:
1: Free versus paid (though it's worth noting that the stats I'm quoting here didn't mention whether the 20 mil included silver accounts)
2: The ease of creating extra/alternate/additional PSN accounts and the occasional benefits of having an account in each region (such as getting demos earlier, etc.).
3: The fact that PSN accounts also apply to the PSP.

So I guess for the numbers to have any real meaning as far as the big 3 consoles go, you need to make two distinctions when counting:
--Only count active Gold subscribers
--Only count PS3-associated PSN accounts

I don't think anyone has bothered to get that picky about the numbers yet.

[C-Kwik]

These numbers aren't going to tell us a whole lot. I would imagine with the PS3 being free and having wi-fi built-in, its certainly much more convenient to get connected. The question is what are the usage statistics. For the companies, MS in particular, the big question is how much revenue is brought in, for which the number of gold memberships would be most relevant. Secondarily (perhaps just as important as XBL revenue to MS), is how much the online experience sells games. Devs are going to be paying much attention to that.