Asian success for Xbox Live as penetration hits 15 per cent

Microsoft's Xbox Live service has proved a huge success in Asian markets, with 15 per cent of Xbox owners in the region playing online only six months after the service launched there.

The Live service has been made available in seven Asia Pacific territories in the last six months, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

The 15 per cent penetration figure compares favourably with the worldwide average of 12 per cent, and according to Yolanda Chan, Xbox regional sales director for Asia Pacific, the firm hopes to grow that to 22 per cent by the end of the fiscal year.

Despite the small size of the Asian market overall for Xbox, this penetration figure means that almost 200,000 of the one million players using the Live service come from the region.

Microsoft has also this week announced a new initiative with the Hong Kong government, which is designed to nurture local game development talent and thus provide more locally developed content for the Xbox in the region.

Similar initiatives already exist in Taiwan and South Korea, and the company also this week reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring that more local content is developed for the Japanese market - if not for the current generation console, then at least for the forthcoming Xbox 2 platform.