PS3's Online Community

[jjmoohead]

I had an interesting converstion with a local game store owner and he was quick to point out that the success of xbox Live for both the orginal xbox and the 360 will both out perform and outlast that of the PS3. He said there is no way that the PS3 online community could come close to that of the Live community.

So I personally have no experience with Live and minimal experience with PS2's online capabailites. Now PS3 is launching some sort of LIVEish type setup. I mean i couldn't agree or disagree with him during the conversation.

Is it fair to conclude that xbox Live platform and community will greatly exceed what is PS plans to put forward? I mean we don't have the numbers to really compair do we?

I am really interested to learn what it is both systems will have to offer and am key to hear what harry's perdictions would be with this.

[Harry]

It's not an easy question, JJ, mostly because there are many questions that haven't been answered by Sony and game publishers yet.

It's undeniable that Xbox Live was the only true online gaming "revolution" in the previous generation of consoles, but this doesn't mean that Live hadn't its faults, and the PlayStation 2 hadn't its strengths.

Microsoft created a unified service, offering strong support to publishers publishing their games on Xbox Live and creating an online community of players. Nowadays, monitoring your user base is invaluable to companies like Microsoft, mostly because it offers a way to have an incredibly detailed view of your target audience. In this way, companies can offer better services but also ask higher rates to their advertisers, which buy highly targeted ads. The disadvantage of Xbox Live was that 1) it asked you to pay in order to play all online games 2) it was targeted only to broadband users. Not everybody wants to play online, but there are players that occasionally may want to do so - I do not think it is right to ask them to pay like hardcore online gamers. Also, in a lot of countries outside North America, broadband connectivity has become a strong reality only in the latest years and only in some places - when the Xbox Live started in Europe, broadband was incredibly far from being as popular as in North America. Once again, this is a proof that the North American market is and will always be Microsoft's #1 priority when it comes to video games.

This said, in terms of services offered to the players, the PlayStation Network Platform won't be any different from Xbox Live. They will both be good, user-friendly, and with similar services. The main difference will be in the way Sony will make players pay for their online services. Marketing experts have still to find the best way to make money and make players happy with online gaming. What's sure, unlike Xbox Live, players will have to pay only for games they want to play; services that are currently available only to Xbox Live Gold users will be free in the PlayStation network. Currently, Xbox Live users must pay a fixed fee to play all Xbox Live games (excluding MMORPGs); the PlayStation Network will be a more decentralized service, so players may have to pay only for those games that they actually want to play. Of course, this doesn't mean that some games won't be playable for free on the PlayStation Network (and this is one of the most important variables in this upcoming console war), and it is possible that Sony will encourage publishers to let hardcore gamers pay fixed fees to play all their line-up of online games - this is probably the way to go in the future. In general, I honestly believe a unified but more decentralized service like the one Sony is creating could fit better the current market of console online gaming; Xbox Live is excellent, but it is still too targeted to the hardcore online gamer.

But the most important thing is that what really counts here is the installation base of each console. If Sony sells twice as many consoles as Microsoft, it will immediately have a stronger (and more varied) online community than Microsoft. While console online gaming is the future (and I said this 5 years ago in an interview for a newspaper, while other journalists didn't agree with me), we are not yet to the point where online services are what make a console sells to the public, unless you are targeting hardcore online gamers and/or North America.