Sony Takes Aim at Xbox Live

Joystiq and the site ComputerandVideoGames are reporting on the first real action in the next-gen war. Sony is apparently readying a strong online service that will meet or exceed the features of Xbox Live. With no firm PS3 launch date yet released, the 360 still has the advantage, but if Sony is rolling out an online matching and media service with their (reportedly) more powerful console things could look bad for Microsoft's new system. From the article: "This story, together with the recent survey Sony conducted, should remove any doubts about Sony's online ambitions. Is it possible that Sony could create a network the size and scale of Xbox Live in such a short time. It has cost Microsoft, the world's largest software company, billions and taken years just to lay the framework for the current Live service. Sony is know for their hyperbolic marketing: the PS2's Emotion Engine, the PSP as iPod-killer; it seems unlikely they could take the crown from Microsoft on their first try, but any attempt is a huge relief. It was beginning to look like Sony didn't think the Live service was a valuable addition to console gaming, or a serious competitor to their hegemony. "

Comments

Free?

[Eightyford]

Will the online service be free?

Re:Free?

[alphaseven]

Short answer, it's unknown at this point.

My guess would be that Sony leaning towards free. I wouldn't be surprised if the PS3 came with some free service for messaging and starting up games, like Xfire or All-Seeing Eye, with developers left on their own for dealing with online play, which is pretty similar to the PC model of online gaming. This is just my guess.

But remember, nothing is really "free". If you don't pay a monthly fee you'll be paying somewhere else, it'll just be embedded in the cost of games and the console, monthly fees for specific games, and advertising maybe.

Interesting Juxtaposition

[Chabil Ha']

It's interesting the juxtaposition of roles here. Sony was the incumbent of the console wars, leaving M$ in the position of proving itself. I think it is pretty safe to say that M$ has given Sony a run for its money, and now M$ is the incumbent to a firmly entrenched online gaming network.

To put succinctly, Sony has one shot to get it right--not to dethrone M$, but prove that its online gaming shows the potential to rival or better M$'s system.

Re:Interesting Juxtaposition

[AKAImBatman]

It's interesting the juxtaposition of roles here. Sony was the incumbent of the console wars, leaving M$ in the position of proving itself. I think it is pretty safe to say that M$ has given Sony a run for its money, and now M$ is the incumbent to a firmly entrenched online gaming network.

We've been here before. Back in 1995, Sega announced their early release of the Saturn to get the drop on Sony. They were quite proud of themselves and thought that their $399 price tag (equivalent to Sony's expected price) combined with the early release would put them in the lead. Then the spokesperson got up to the microphone at the E3 and said three words that killed the Saturn on arrival.

"two ninety-nine"

The Playstation undercut the Saturn by a full hundred dollars, maintaining its expected lead in the market. It was released several months later to much fanfare, while no one purchased a Saturn.

Will Sony pull a rabbit out of it's hat again? Maybe. All I know is that there's a lot of noise about the 360, yet not all that many people seem to have one.

Re:Interesting Juxtaposition

[nathanh]

We've been here before. Back in 1995, Sega announced their early release of the Saturn to get the drop on Sony. They were quite proud of themselves and thought that their $399 price tag (equivalent to Sony's expected price) combined with the early release would put them in the lead. Then the spokesperson got up to the microphone at the E3 and said three words that killed the Saturn on arrival.

Well, there was also the small matter that the PlayStation had significantly better 3D than the Saturn; the Saturn was strong in 2D but 3D seemed like an afterthought. Plus the PlayStation had the launch title of all launch titles... Tekken.

I appreciate that the urban legend is that the three magic words "two ninety nine" at E3 caused the Saturn to fail, but I don't buy it. Price alone is not that significant a factor. If it was then the Gamecube would have been far more popular than the PS2 or Xbox. It's more about the games and the PlayStation had the better games. That's also why the Dreamcast tanked; it was a better console but PS2 had better games.

One thing hopefully

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

A few years ago Sony made a big to do about Cell Processing, and the ability to do distributed computing across networks. The idea was they were going to put Cell processors in everything from soup to nuts, and these would all combine to make your PS3 more powerful. In addition to this, Sony was describing the ability to connect PS3's together over a network and allow them to combine to create a super-computing gaming system.

The one thing that Sony could do to make their online presence greater then Xbox Live would be to enable some form of shared processing environment, either to directly improve gaming performance, OR even to facilitate using the PS3 to work on global science problems while your not using it, like the slew of _@home distributed scientific projects. Using your PS3 for more then just vapid video gaming would make it appeal to a greater audience as it could find aliens, accurately predict weather, cure cancer, solve world hunger and facilitate world peace. I would buy a game console that could do all that. Xbox360 sucks because it can't do that.

Could it be with SOE?

[Yez70]

Sony Online Entertainment (provider EQ, Matric Online, SWG as well as various PS and PSP online titles) released an interview recntly that sheds a little light on this.... http://www.gamergod.com/article.php?article_id=353 8

I wouldn't want to play third fiddle.

[Inoshiro]

MS's system is sure gabbed about like it's a success, when it's not.

Xbox Live! has, roughly, 1 million subscribers. There's been a pretty steady state number of subscribers since people would run out of interesting games on Live!, leaving a drought before the next set of interesting titles. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag became boring after a while.

Compare this with Nintendo's DS service. They've already peaked over 1 million people in the space of a few months, beating out Microsoft's Xbox Live! service. Surprise, surprise, Microsoft has admitted that it's not working by offering the basic service for free (after all, if you want to pay for basic access, you're going to limit your customer base).

Nintendo was right to wait and figure out the logistics. Sony was stupid to wait too long, and set some bad precedents on their front. Nintendo has managed to turn a lot of people's biggest complaint into their biggest strength with the DS online service, and it's soon going to be linked to the Revolution service. That's a pretty good lead.

Re:I wouldn't want to play third fiddle.

[poot_rootbeer]

Wow, five games, two of which aren't released yet.

And yet, those three titles have drawn nearly as many players to Nintendo WiFi in a few months as it has taken Xbox Live years to. Kinda makes you think, no?

Re:I wouldn't want to play third fiddle.

[generic-man]

Yeah, it makes me think how desperate Nintendo DS owners are. They collectively paid millions of dollars to buy a device touted as having "built-in Wi-Fi" only to bore of PictoChat and local apps like the Metroid FPS demo. Now that three current games support Wi-Fi play on the Internet, eager DS owners pony up even more cash to find a system that requires clunky code entry to play against your friends and has all sorts of idiotic connectivity problems.

Um, look...

[Hitto]

I'm a Nintendo fanboy, have always been, will always be.
But currently, Nintendo WFC supports a grand total of three games. I haven't given Tony Hawk a try yet, so I can only speak for Mario kart and Animal Crossing.

"It's there" is the only good thing I can say about it. Yes, it is a huge leap forward to at last be able to play like-minded individuals who were bored outta their minds while playing their friends on regular Mario Kart, watching the others duke it out for a good thirty seconds to see who would be in second place. Yes, it's a fun game, possibly the best Mario Kart ever.
However, disconnecting pieces of shit suck. Friend codes suck. The interface is really NOT GOOD. Finding a game can take some time. It just sucks. The game in itself rocks all hell, and actually playing with some "nice guys" (by the way, spread the love, www.dsmeet.com ) is a great experience. But this "OH WE DON'T WANT PEDOS TO PLAY WITH TEH KIDDIES" bullshit could have been handled in other ways, and even though IANAL, I'm sure there was a sensible way to avoid any kind of "MY KID GOT RAPED BECAUSE HE MET A PERVERT PLAYING POKEMON ONLINE" without pissing the old-school crowd too much.

Animal Crossing is great fun. If you like to type 15 characters per line when you wanna chat, instead of simply incorporating pictochat, if you find something to do with people, heck it's fun! But at the end of the day, playing dollhouse is MY secret shame, and I'm not inviting you to steal my furry girlfriend away.

All in all, as a first shot, it's well-done, I'm glad they succeed, I'm glad it's free, but Big N has a few kinks to work out.

I'm not really saying it sucks. It's just that it sucks LESS than the competition, and I'm not holding my breath for the DRM3, thankyouverymuch!

Re:Jaded about online console games...

[ClamIAm]

The same way you cheat in any electronic game: by finding exploits. Games today have tons of code in them, increasing the possibility of bugs and exploits (compared to Joust, anyway). And while all developers do testing, the number of people who see the game before release compared to afterwards is on the order of thousands to one. I think two good quotes here would be ESR's "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and Cliffy B's (paraphrased) "gamers will do all they can to destroy the game you created for them".

Halo 2 is a good example. I've seen people do crazy things like using the lock-on targeting with the sword and flying across arenas, or glitches that would cause you to not be able to pick up certain items. I've also only played on LAN connections (I don't have an Xbox). There was also some bug that involved hitting a pause/suspend button on your modem (dunno what that is) that would create some kind of grief.

That's odd, I've heard of you somewhere...

[Hitto]

"
Hey guys,

I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco that targeted web forums.

I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour. And they had different "verticals" so there was the sports guy, and the games guy, the hentai, excuse me I mean anime guy, etc.

But the most critical point was this: develop and integrate the identity. No random "HEY EB GAMES IS AWESOME BUY THIS" stuff.

Kinda spooky.

Didn't take the job. It was a fucking mill."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/show/21589

Hmm. So you were wowed by the PS2 at launch? Can you remind us the name of the wowie-games? Oh, and learn grammar, your last sentence contradicts you.