Xbox Live lawsuit is worth 'pennies'

Remember that class action lawsuit last week that claimed $5 million in damages for Xbox Live downtime? It was filed by 3 Texas residents, but is the monetary figure justifiable? Gaming Steve did the math to determine that, at $50 a year for Gold service, one day of outage is worth approximately 13.7 cents. For about six days of outages, that's 82 cents, or $2.46 for the three who filed the suit. Punitive damages aside, the $5 million would cover 36.5 million Xbox Live Gold users who were hit with outages.

Of course, all the math is moot when you read the Xbox Live Terms of Use, specifically clause 16, which begins "We Make No Warranty: We provide the Service 'as-is,' 'with all faults' and 'as available.'" Just be happy you're getting a free game, fellas. As for the disheartened lawyers, don't fret, they can now spend more time trying to monetize the missing Halo 3 pixels.