Imagine you wanted to play your console video games with your friends, but you weren鈥檛 much for getting up and heading over to a friend鈥檚 house to play. Or perhaps you wanted to play with someone across the globe, but couldn鈥檛 find a way to connect.
In 2002, Xbox found a way to do this with Xbox Live. This new Xbox console included a broadband feature that connected games online so that multiple people could play the same game at a time, from their own living rooms. You could add your friends to a 鈥淔riends鈥� list to see when they were online and play along with them, or find people around the world to play whenever you wanted. Instead of playing against the game console, you played against people.
While similar services had previously been available on PCs, this was a big step for console gamers, and it has been heralded as a huge success for Microsoft (the maker of Xbox) and a big change to the game console market. As of 2013, Microsoft reported more than 46 million members on Xbox Live.
