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Sony Says No To Central PS3 Online Service
Saige writes "Online gaming fans are going to have to look past the PS3 to get their fix - Sony has announced that they are not doing a central service for PS3 online gaming. Instead, it will be done in the same manner as the PS2, where each company decides what effort to put into it. Considering how weak the online support has been for the PS2, this may not bode well for Sony, especially with more and more rumours that they won't be launching until at least the 2006 holidays." With the Live service such a success and Nintendo rolling out its WiFi network, it seems odd that Sony isn't going to try for something similar.
i don't see where they announced anything in that article....it still seems like speculation but maybe it would be easier to tell if we were able to read more than 2 paragraphs of the article
*shrugs*
I think that Sony's trying to cater to the publishers, most of whom want to run their own connection systems to charge customers (or not) by themselves. Companies such as Squeenix, Capcom, etc, all probably have their own ideas about how to charge clients, and don't want a middle man.
However, as the success of Live demonstrates, having a centralized system can be a very good thing. I don't use Live myself, but if I didn't have three wonderful little rug rats and if they had a good MMO attached to it (say like WoW of FFXI - coming soon) with voice support, I'd use it.
The question is - how will publishers react? Will they go "Good - we get to do what we want" and make for the PS3, or just use MS's easy to use and so far working Live system?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
This will translate into most developers putting their effort into the X-Box Live enabled versions of their games, and half-assing their PS2 online efforts, if bothering at all.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
They probably know they can't pull it off like MS did, so they aren't even going to bother.
You know, success is relative. Let's look at some numbers here.
Number of PS2's sold: 90 million
Number of Xboxes sold: 24 million
Number of subscribers to Xbox Live: ~2 million
Amount of revenue MS has generated from the Xbox, Xbox Live, and Xbox games: -$4 billion (that's negative four billion dollars)
So, let's see. The decentralized PS2 has sold more than three times the number of Xboxes worldwide, and even among that much smaller Xbox user base, less than one in ten owners actually subscribes to Xbox Live. With a $4 billion loss, I literally just can't see what XBL has contributed to MS's bottom line - if the service itself has turned any sort of profit, it's buried under an avalanche of other losses related to the system.
If this is success, I'd like to see what gets termed failure around here!
Personally, XBL is one reason I'm waiting on buying an Xbox 360. I am actually averse to it, and I don't think I'm alone. It's one of the things that's given the current Xbox its reputation as a system for hardcore gamers; it's almost as if you have to have a little community of fellow geeks willing to play online to really get much out of the system. With MS focusing so heavily on even further promoting XBL for the 360, it's basically scaring me away as someone who likes to play solo and with friends or the wife in the same room. I'm just not interested in gaming with a bunch of immature, bitch-happy teen and pre-teen strangers, and I unfortunately (or fortunately?) do not have a little community of online geek friends around me to play games with.
I don't think I'm alone. The PS2 sold as well as it did because it catered to such a broad cross-section of gamers. I don't see that from the 360 - MS keeps saying they're trying to broaden the audience, but their actions say exactly the opposite. Every game has to be online, the system will always be online, buying the system automatically gives you an XBL account. Developers will need to make games with those things in mind. I don't want that. All I want is a little box that sits there and lets me play games either alone or with other people in my own house. Even approximately 90% of current Xbox users appear to feel the same way. I honestly think the heavy focus on Xbox Live is holding back both current Xbox sales as well as future Xbox 360 sales - it's scaring away offline players.
All three of the next-gen systems will be online in one way or another, but I prefer the model Sony and Nintendo are using, which is much more relaxed and feels less forced.
Ah, my mistake. Never mind about what you get for free.
I think you overestimate the expected market size of Xbox 360 Live. You can easily claim that Joe Sixpack doesn't have the broadband connection or the PC to play Worlds of Warcraft, but WoW is still chugging along and will make a ton of money. There are plenty of potential customers who can hook their broadband connection up to a game console. Wireless networking? Take a wardrive some time -- any populated area is swarming with $20 access points that couldn't all have been set up by "geeks."
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Well, Nintendo seems to think so.
Most users are not willing to pay for online play, and that's where I think Microsoft is wrong. Most people won't pay every month for something that they use a couple of hours a week, and that's how much the average console owner spends using a console. Even a serious gamer like me would have trouble justifying paying a montly/yearly fee to each console manufacturer to be able to play online. Free online gaming is a good way of making me buy games for your console. Making me pay a subscription while other consoles let me play online for free is a great way of making sure I buy more games for the other consoles.
I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. It seems like this could make the online capabilities of the PS2 more robust, and doesn't tie any developer down to a specific framework for online gaming. Really, it just all boils down to specific implementation, and all the speculation at this point just boils down to a bunch of whistling in the dark.
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Developers don't add network support to PS2 games because the PS2 does not have a standard ethernet port - to get ethernet one has to buy an additional network device, which sells for $40 - about four times the cost of a decent ethernet adapter for a PC. This has lead to a very small installed base for the PS2 network adapter, so developers have little to gain from supporting it.
With the PS3 the situation is entirely reversed - the system has built-in networking capabilities, and, unlike the Xbox 360, will not require users to subscribe to an online gaming service. By not requiring users to subscribe, Sony creates a larger player base, and frees developers from being trapped in the proprietary world of a central service, meaning that developers have a GREATER incentive to develop network content for the PS3 than for the Xbox 360.
Frankly, there will be plenty of time to determine a winner. The X-Box Live! system has certain advantages, and the PS3 method has other advantages. XBL will likely have more online playable games, and they will likely remain playable for as long as the income from the subscriptions pays for the expenses of maintaining the service. PS3 will likely have more free online playable games, but they may stop working if the publisher decides it wasn't popular enough, or if they've released a sequel and want people to buy that instead of playing the old ones. The Live system requires a subscription that might turn some people away, but it is a single subscription for nearly all online games. The PS3 system doesn't require a subscription, but individual games may. If too many games require individual subscriptions, this may alienate gamers, too.
This will be interesting to see which approach wins out in the end.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
You should really work for Sony's PR department. Only a mindless marketing droid could possibly see this as a "win" for Sony.
I'm curious. What the hell does this have to do with the point I made. The great-grandparent poster was implying that the free Live Silver account was a good thing. I'm still trying to understand how it's good for the customer. I totally see how it's good for Microsoft/Publishers:
1. MS can use it to upsell you to Gold so you can play games online - you cannot play online with Silver.
2. MS can use it to patch backwards compatibility. (They don't have to get it right to launch, they can abandon it as soon as they want.)
3. Publishers can sell you buggy games and patch them later. (Your fault if you don't have a HD to hold the patches)
4. MS/Publishers can sell you additional crap after you've already forked out $60 for the game.
Ok, now that I'm done being a sarcastic ass, I'll level with you. I like the unified identity part. There are things that Live is good for. But saving you money is not one of those things. So let's look at the PS3/Xbox over their lifespan which we'll call 5 years: (ignoring that the Xbox's span has been 4 years and Sony will be at 6 years for the PS2 by the launch of the PS3)
To play games online on XB Live Silver over the next 5 years you'll spend nothing, and you'll have a gamertag, but you can't actually play online.
To play games online on XB Live Gold over the next 5 years you'll spend $300+, and have the same gamertag in every game.
To play games online on the PS3 over the next 5 years you'll spend nothing, have no gamertag, but you will be able to play online - free.
Some people might consider $300 significant. To a hard core gamer, or an MMO afficiando it's nothing, and probably well worth it. But to the majority - the casual gamer - why pay all that money for something that you can get for free?
Yeah, I know - Publishers could start charging for online play.... but has that happened yet in any game outside the MMO arena, on any console or any computer? Not that I know of, and I expect it to continue that way. I'd be surprised to hear publishers are getting any of the Xbox Live revenues, so if they want to charge for the PS3, what makes you think they won't charge for the Xbox? In fact, if publishers decide to try to charge, it makes total sense to try it out on the 360 first rather than the PS3 since they can conveniently use the Live marketplace to charge users, especially since those users have already made it clear they have no qualms with paying to play since they're already paying MS $60/yr.
So yes, while Live is perfect for hardcore gamers, I'm not convinced it's worth the cost to too many outside that demographic. Me? It's not worth it to me on the Xbox now - especially when I can do the same for free on my PS2, so my Xbox is and will remain a Live virgin for the foreseeable future.
Re "vested interest": It's not an issue of whether you stand to benefit financially. I don't think that you'd submit a news item one-sidedly criticising a Microsoft policy decision. But complaining about bias on Slashdot is kind of pointless, I guess.
"And claiming Live prevents entire genres of games has no basis in reality whatsoever."
How many MMORPGs are available on the Xbox again?
"You think they're making developers sign contracts that requires them to only make certain types of games on Xbox Live?"
I know for a fact that the third party contract makes it impossible to implement certain types of online game on the Xbox. They're not allowed to run games from their own servers without special dispensation. They're not allowed to connect to anything other than the Xbox Live servers or other Xboxes. They're not permitted to allow gamers on different platforms to play against Xbox users. The centralised subscription model makes it commercially suicidal to charge per-game subscription fees. This is why virtually all third party Xbox Live games run peer to peer. They're all FPS and driving games because they're cheap to put online, not persistent, and that's all that they can market to the incredibly homogenised 10% of the Xbox userbase that signed up to Live.
"Xbox Live is a framework that handles certain parts of online gaming so the developers don't have to worry about implementing it all over again - it doesn't prevent any types of games from being done over live."
See above. Developers can't cherry pick the beneficial features from the framework, they have to comply to the limitations as well. Xbox Live is an attempt to graft the product tying business model that works for traditional console games into the online space. It exists only to funnel revenue back to Microsoft. It won't work in a competitive environment, for the same reason the N64's expensive cartridges nuked third party support for the N64.
"Ask EA about that - you sign in through Live, but then you're on EA's servers doing things EA's way. And here's a hint - EA's way is pathetic. The largest game developer out there, and they can't even do a halfway decent service compared to Xbox Live."
If you thought about it for a second, you'd realise that EA's position is not one that they would choose to be in. They wanted to circumvent Live altogether, so that they could market online play to the whole of the Xbox user base, so that people who bought Madden on PS2 could play against people who bought it on Xbox (what with it being exactly the same game), and so that they didn't have to force their customers to pay an additional fee to take their games online. This would have been the ideal outcome for everyone involved.
Microsoft did not allow them to do this. The only reason EA games on Xbox have an online component at all (one that 90% of Xbox customers can't access) is because both MS and EA wanted EA's multiplatform titles to have identical feature lists on Xbox and PS2. It looked kind of stupid for MS to evangelise about online being the future when Madden and NHL only supported online play on PS2 and PC. They'll 'do it right' when it pays and when people can actually use it - which is why both Sony and Nintendo have chosen not to lock third parties into a closed system.
(Incidentally, they've drastically played down the "online is the future" spiel with the Xbox 360, for instance Robbie Bach said recently that they only expect 50% of Xbox 360 owners to ever take their machines online, let alone pay to play).
As for the actual EA/Live game experience, the only game that I've ever heard anyone complain about is Burnout 3, which is hardly a representative sample (having changed publishers midway through development and been rushed to market).
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