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On Xbox Live's Past, Present, Future
Thanks to TeamXbox for its interview with Andre Vrignaud from Microsoft's Xbox Live Platform Strategy Team, in which he discusses topics including user numbers (they're "on track" for 1 million subscribers by now, and "on average people are playing three hours a day (which is up from the 2.5 hours we saw a year ago), and the average number of people on Friends lists continues to climb - it's a little over 13 right now."), as well as the Xbox Live alerts through MSN Messenger ("In fact, you can look at these as being the first pieces of Xbox Live on Windows. If anything, people are pushing us to release more of Live on Windows as quickly as possible - and we're working on it!")
The bigger question is: why does the Xbox, with Xbox Live being so easy, only have as many games online as the PS2; which has no set standard and operating rules for online games?
One big factor, as has recently been seen, is Microsoft's draconian approach to XBL. IE, until recently MICROSOFT controlled ALL the game 'servers' and the game creators/owners did not. And I put servers in the little quotes because even though MS touted dedicated servers as a benefit of Live, there aren't any besides PSO's LOBBIES (the actual game runs P2P after the lobbies are exited). Not a single dedicated server on the entirety of XBL, otherwise.
Yet, there ARE dedicated servers on the PS2's front. SOCOM and SOCOM II use them; as do EverQuest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI, for example.
But, it took EA not biting on the Live hook to get MS to finally realize "hey, maybe if we lessened that restriction, more companies will use it." That concession of allowing companies to control their own servers, and conceeding to not release any XSN Sports titles this year, seemed to have finally won EA over.
Maybe now Activision and Neversoft will put the next THPS online on the Xbox, since the last 3 versions for the PS2 have been online there. Yet, none have been on XBL, because Neversoft wanted control of how the matchmaking worked, and Microsoft was being all "our way or the highway" when Neversoft had already worked out matchmaking abilities through GameSpy. Guess which version of the past few THPS games sold more, PS2 or Xbox? Online abilities are why I chose the PS2 version over the Xbox ones since THPS3, and I can assume it was a decision for a few others as well, even though the Xbox versions looked way better.
And only one in ten Xboxes have live? Any stats on PS2?
Actually, it's closer to 1:13-1:15 for XBL, not even 1:10, worldwide. Europe is sitting at around 100k subscribers, Japan less than that, so the rest of the subscribers are in North America, where the ratio will be better than 1:10... but worldwide, if MS has hit the 1 million mark, it is ony 6.66%-7.69% going online depending on how many Xboxes have been sold. If they haven't hit that 1 million subscriber mark, then the percentage is even less.
The PS2 has supposedly sold 3 million network adapters, but even if that were true, and every single one of them was used (which they aren't by Sony's own admission, only around 1 million have been used), when we consider there are potentially over 70 million PS2s in the wild, the ratio for PS2 online players to non online players is staggeringly low at a woeful 4.28% of all PS2's going online (if we assume all 3 million adapters have gone online). That's not even 1:20 PS2's online. The actual percentage is a mere 1.42% going online on the PS2, which isn't even 1:50 (it's still below 2:100).
The fee is more like $3 a month too. It just comes down to how much you think your time is worth. Personally I'll pay the tiny fee in order to save the time it takes to find a decent server. YMMV.
That is the main complaint I have heard over and over concerning XBox Live. I'm sure it can't be much worse than your run of the mill counter-strike server, but understandbly it would become annoying for EVERY GAME to be like that.
America's Army has a good (imho) system that gives a player a rank, and then subtracts honor points for tk'ing or ta'ing, and grants honor points based on the kills or objectives completed. It works very well and there are honor-only servers for more serious players. It would not be that hard for XBL to host something like this with in-game support to raise / lower the ranking based on how they play. As for the retarded swearing, just sit back and realize how stupid these people sound, cause that's all you can do.