Xbox Living

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the question: is Xbox Live ready for the holidays? Aaron Greenberg, group product manager of the Xbox 360 at Microsoft, has an answer for me: Yes.

I took the above picture nearly a year ago, in the midst of struggles with the Xbox Live service.  Too many people signed up for the service and it began to experience some trouble.  A few months later, Microsoft gave us the Xbox Live Arcade game Undertow for free, as an apology.  Some people tried to sue Microsoft for it, as well.

This year, the Xbox 360 release schedule shows a huge line up of popular games this year, including Gears of War 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Fallout 3, Fable II and more.  The Xbox 360 is now the lowest-priced unit out there starting at a cool $199, and the new Xbox Live Experience has made it more attractive than ever.  Surely, we must be screwed!

Greenberg, however, tells Kotaku that Microsoft is ready:

“We’ve built a lot of infrastructure, a lot of behind the curtain no one sees. This is something that Microsoft is good at. We are well prepared for the type of growth we expect this holiday.”

Just in case there are problems, Greenberg also says that there will be more people around to deal with them.

We will have people standing by, more people on hand than we’ve ever had before. Knock on wood we will hopefully not have any issues.”

Knock, knock, Mr. Greenberg.  Knock, knock.