Right at the tail end of the first day of the EGN show there was a talk that sounded like it could be quite interesting; 'Exploiting the business opportunities presented by gaming over the next five years'. Hauling my weary body and by now dazed mind up to the last of the waterfront conference rooms I took a seat and got ready to listen to the presentation. The speaker was Jeff Pabst, Microsoft's Business Development Manager for Live. Apparently this was one of Jeff's first public speaking engagements as he started off a little nervously. Utilising the ubiquitous presence of a PowerPoint presentation to display some statistics, Jeff soon got into the swing of things.

First we were treated to a little bit of justified boasting. So far, is available in 24 countries and currently has over 1 million subscribers. That's a pretty impressive number considering the broadband requirements. He was pleased to inform us that by there will be over 150 Live-enabled games out there. This means that they are entering the walk stage of the three stage catchphrase that neatly outlines strategy: Crawl, Walk, Run. Jeff told us how the company wanted to ensure that they had the basics right - the crawl stage - before they went ahead and began to push Live as a key feature of games, the walk stage. The future is Run, when the integration between on- and offline play will be blurred even further and subscribers will comprise a greater variety of gamers. Unsurprisingly, he noted that 75% of current Xbox Live subscribers are also gamers who enjoy online gaming. Until the necessity for an existing broadband connection is rendered obsolete this ratio will probably stay the same. But for the time being Microsoft continue to place a high importance on working in conjunction with major ISPs.

Nor was it a surprise to hear that 90% of Xbox Live gamers are male, with 45% of them occupying the 14-24 age range. So far these are the gamers that the developers and Microsoft have been catering for. The hardcore gamer knows what he likes and what he likes is driving fast cars, killing things, making things blow up and beating other people at titles. To satisfy this last sub-group Jeff told us about the International World Cup, the first FIFA-approved online competition. Using the soon to be released FIFA 2005, gamers will be able to sign up for the and go through the stages with the aim of being crowned the world's best. While details of the competition's staging and prizes were non-existent, we were treated to a very loud of frantically edited FIFA 2005 action. And while many footie fans have little time for EA's iffy representation of the game the potential of a fully licensed worldwide tournament is very high and could do a lot to help competitive online gaming reach the levels of respect and saturation that it enjoys in South Korea.

The rest of the presentation focused on Microsoft's desire to expand the demographics of Xbox Live subscribers beyond its currently young-male dominated boundaries. 'How to get your mum' involved is a key question that the company is trying to address. While the majority of people who play games over the internet on a PC are middle-aged women, the types of games that they enjoy have so far been non-existent on consoles. Currently Live games tend to be racers or sports games. Microsoft wants to hook the 'mum' demographic with 'time-wasting' games which you can dip into for a few brief moments versus those that encourage long marathon gaming sessions.

With the information gleaned form the very popular Zone.com gaming service Microsoft are finalising the plans for Xbox Live Arcade. The kinds of games that will focus on are those which so far have been restricted to places like Zone.com and other similar services. On top of this they will add games that appeal to current Live subscribers which continue the theme of small, time-wasting entertainment. So along with the card, puzzle and social sports games there will be some arcade and retro titles. The Arcade is the next big step for Live, with Microsoft hoping that it will encourage more people to buy Xboxes with the express purpose of signing up to Live and joining the more socially driven dynamics of the Arcade service.

At the moment a major problem is that most Xboxes subscribed to Live are in the living room where the console often has to take second place to Eastenders and Law & Order. As most people don't want to string wires all over their house most Xboxes in the rooms of the young aren't on Live, a situation which hampers the amount of revenue that can be earned from those eager young gamers. So Jeff let it be known that the favoured solution for this is wireless, or in his words, 'wireless is coming'. Well this journo could only take that as word that the next Xbox will have built in wireless support. Unfortunately this was the only part of the talk which even hinted about the Xbox 2's existence, a very curious omission of necessity that kind of made a mockery of the title of the talk. I can understand the Microsoft must keep details of the Xbox 2 close to its chest, but as that next generation machine will be the centre of Live from 2005 onwards it was disappointing to have nothing more than a single allusion made about the technology behind the future of the Live service. Consequently, no information was forthcoming about the future of the first generation Xbox in the Live service. By the end of the talk I was considering getting trade descriptions involved over the title of the speech I had just spent 40 minutes listening to.

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