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Why The X-Box Network Will Fail
angkor wrote to us an article from The Register that looks at what Microsoft is planning for the X-Box Network. The factual information is educating on it's own - and the analysis of why they think it will fail is interesting as well.
All good points. I would add a few other things. One, Blizzard is a good example of why Microsoft's strategy may be more successful. Battle.net may be free, but it is also buggy, overcrowded, laggy, and infested with cheaters. Blizzard lacks either the ability, or the desire to fix these problems. With Microsoft's strategy there is one system to police and maintain. If it works well, all the games on it will work well. With Sony's strategy each game will be a crapshoot. Some companies will get it right, others will be abysmal failures whether they charge or not.
Battle.net would not be successful on a console. There environment it too hostile for casual gamers. The console market is different from the pc market. PC online gamers are mostly hardcore gamers willing to fiddle with stuff to get it to work. Consoles like the playstation 2 are so successful (>30 million world-wide) precisely because they don't limit themselves to hardcore gamers. Microsoft's system will present one unified, homogenous, well maintained destination for all gaming. On Sony's system you will have to deal with 10 different companies and their separate bills, servers, interfaces, matchmaking systems and quirks. Plus, with the XBox you can find your friends and talk with them anywhere on the network, anytime, no matter what game they are playing.
p.s. If you like subspace, it is far from dead. It is now called Continuum, but it is the exact same game. Check out www.subspacehq.com. That game ate my life when it was in beta years ago. It is a perfect example of a game that would have succeeded with Microsoft's system because they wouldn't have had to pay for servers. There are many great games that will never be popular enough to pay for the infrastructure investment necessary to make them online. The only way around this is user hosted servers (the common pc model) and this won't work with consoles.
David