Video game consoles give consumers the ability to participate in one of the most loved forms of entertainment; gaming. However, while most games feature expansive offline gameplay, that’s only have the fun. With the introduction of high speed broadband Internet came the phenomenon of online gaming with services like Xbox Live and the Playstation Network taking center stage.

While the Playstation Network is offered free of charge, Xbox Live is more popular with online numbers breaking records on the regular. Today, Microsoft has come forth to show off those numbers by saying about half of their 25 million Xbox Live members are Gold subscribers that pay $60 a year for the service. The company then elaborated by saying Gold members spend about 40% of their Xbox Live time on services like Netflix, Last.fm, and Zune making the platform a very valuable asset.

Are you an Xbox Live Gold subscrbier? If so, what do you live most about the service?

via thatvideogameblog

Major Nelson has recently reported on his official blog that the Xbox Live service will be down for up to 24 hours starting on Tuesday, June 16th at 12:01 AM PST. This downtime includes the ‘My Xbox’ portion of Xbox.com along with making it impossible for users to post on the Xbox forums.

This window of downtime will give Microsoft the chance to prep the service for the new Xbox Live features that were announced at this year’s E3. Those features include Last.fm, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and more.

However, please make note that you will not gain access to these features once Xbox Live goes back up as they will not officially go live until later this year.

It was recently announced over at the Smash Bros. Dojo that the service that allows users to upoad things like replays and custom stages will be no more. Below is the following announcement taken straight from the site:

As of June 30th, 2009, the current service that accepts user-generated snapshots, stage designs, and replay data will no longer be available. Please note, however, that we will continue to distribute such data after that date.

Hmm, no word as to why this service will be ending or if it will ever return.

Oh yeah and before you get too worked up please make note that this announcement won’t affect your ability to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl online, you just won’t be able to upload user created content anymore.

Bungie has recently announced on their website that their Render-to-Video service has entered a public beta. If you don’t know what this service is, it lets users converted saved ingame clips into actual video. This is a much needed feature for those who like to compile Halo 3 montages or other machinima.

Don’t throw away your capture card yet as this service will cost you Bungie Points. What are Bungie Points? Bungies answer to Microsoft Points, I guess. Honestly though, you’ll be able to exchange 1 Bungie Point for 1 minute of standard definition video or 5 points for 1 minute of high definition video.

Bungie says the beta will run until July with the actual service going live sometime around Bungie Day (July 7th).