Does Xbox Live use p2p servers

[Trembledust]

Hey guys. With the news MS is raising the price of Xbox Live to an extra $10 a year some debate has come up in some of the other forums I visit regarding the reasons for the hike.

One of my theories is inflation and the fact that its possible with Kinect coming in Nov the new Kinect features may require additional bandwidth.

But anyways what I was curious about is does anyone know for sure if Xbox Live use p2p server connections primarily? I'm not a network guy so my terminology for some things will be off, but my understand was that MS doesn't usually allow developers / publishers to run any of the MP portions of their games on the devs or publishers servers, but rather make them use MS's own servers with the exception of EA in regards to their sports titles.

To me I was always under the assumption that if MS is making the majority of devs / publishers use MS's servers and not their own would a p2p set up make sense? Also in terms of reliability I have always heard xbox live tops PSN so again the p2p option makes less sense to me.

[zanzabar]

i think that most of the games are p2p, i know that gears also halo3. it works by using the live matchmaking server then loading the server from 1 console and it all links up, like border lands on the pc or MW2.

on live v psn ive never had a problem with psn but when the ps3 was not selling well there would be no people on the smaller/older games but live u would have everything with a good number of people, now that the sells alot better i have not seen anything that had an abandoned game, and psn is free to play games so thats a nice addition to the console

[jeremyshaw]

Though MS does pay a hefty price every year to rent out Level(3)'s backbone datacenters for use with XBL...

[ColonelCain]

Another reason? "Xbox exclusive map-packs", and the like. Doesn't matter if we don't want them, but it still happens. I don't even think that we get them any earlier than they would have been released if it wasn't "exclusive".

On the original topic, the majority of games on 360 utilized P2P matchmaking, as it is part of the "Xbox LIVE" certification.