1 billion 360 Achievements unlocked

As is traditional during big platform holder speeches, Microsoft rolled out lots of big stats during John Schappert's GDC keynote in San Francisco - among the most eye-catching being that over 1 billion Achievements have now been unlocked. This was celebrated with a "BINK!" noise, naturally.

So what else did we find out? Here's a brief rundown to save you having to wade through more of our wittering:

• "The Xbox 360 community has now unlocked over 1 billion Achievements." Sorry, done that one.
• BioShock, Halo 3, Madden NFL 08, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4 and Guitar Hero III all sold over 1 million units on 360 during the 2007 Christmas period.
• John Schappert said that Microsoft has more titles rated 80 or above, or 90 or above, than PS3 and Wii put together, citing Metacritic data.
• "Gamers have activated almost 20 billion [Microsoft] points" - that's over USD 250 million spent online, not including Xbox Live Gold memberships.
• "The Halo 3 community is uploading approximately 100,000 pieces of user-generated content every day." That's more than all the daily uploads on YouTube, apparently - 30 percent more.
• XNA Game Studio tools have been downloaded over 800,000 times. "That's a lot of creativity and passion that we've tapped into out there," said Chris Satchell. XNA is working with over 400 universities.
• The XNA "Dream Build Play" competition had more than 200 entries, and in the end Microsoft handed our four professional game contracts rather than the one it had intended because the standard was so high.

Oh, and Gears of War 2 is due out in November. That's sort of a stat.