Variety blogger Ben Fritz gets to the bottom of the debate between Xbox Live and the Playstation Network (PSN).

If you're interested in the business of video games, there's only one statistic of any significance: Sony has generated $180 million in gross revenue from PSN two-plus years of life. As of the last E3, after about five and a half years, Xbox Live had generated over $1 billion.

That's not terribly surprising considering Xbox Live has a subscription fee and the Playstation Network doesn't. However, there's no way to untangle how much of Xbox Live's revenue is from subscriptions and how much is from sales. It just goes to show that you can't trust videogamers to actually buy stuff. It's better to charge them a regular fee they can forget about, like MMOs do.