Xbox Live turns ten: 270 billion achievement points earned to date

Xbox Live has turned ten years old this week, and Microsoft has gone both stat and freebie-crazy. 270 billion achievement points have been earned since they were launched, for example. That's a lot of effort people, well played. Get more stats and freebie information below.

Kotaku reports on Microsoft's stats, revealing that since the service launched in 2002, 122,265,266 friendships had been forged over Xbox Live at the time of writing. Also, 4.5 billion achievements have been unlocked the world over, worth a whopping 270 billion achievement points.

Elsewhere, Major Nelson got nostalgic and posted an audio clip of the original Xbox dashboard sound, and posted some old images of it on his Flickr.

Finally, Strategy Informer reports that players who have been an Xbox Live member for some time - it's unspecified how long is required - will receive a special avatar helmet. Here's a pic courtesy of the site:

Nice, but American veterans are receiving free Xbox Slim consoles for their years of faithful subscriptions, while the rest of the world gets an avatar helmet. Thoughts people?