In simpler times, you handed your friend a controller and played multiplayer games on your couch. Now? It's all about online. To play against real humans on Xbox, you need an Xbox Live Gold subscription. That costs money.

However, in the wake of Click Frenzy and the upcoming Black Friday sales, Microsoft have slashed the price on 3-Month Gold subscriptions - best of all, you can download multiple codes and Microsoft will add them consecutively.

Happy Christmas, gamers! Microsoft has announced it will be bringing locally-hosted multiplayer Xbox Live services to Australians, starting today. The dedicated Xbox Live servers will provide increased reliability and stability to a range of Xbox One video games, including Forza Motorsport 5, Sunset Overdrive and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

What happens if your Xbox Live account gets hacked? Tracey over at Kotaku has investigated and found that Microsoft's processes can sometimes take months to resolve the issue if it gets resolved at all, despite recent changes meant to speed up the restoration of hacked accounts. A good read (and a precautionary tale about online services which have access to your credit card details).

Microsoft promised that ABC iView would appear on the recently-updated Xbox Live sometime in December, and that day has come: the catch-up service has rolled out for Australian users today. Given the dire state of most network TV over Christmas, it's a very welcome update for Xbox owners.

From an Australian perspective, the most pertinent feature of the recent Xbox dashboard update was the promised addition of local media channels direct to the device. Two of those options have gone live today, with SBS On Demand and ninemsn video being added, along with YouTube. But what about ABC iView?