PlayStation Network Details

Gamasutra has details on the gaming network that will underpin the PlayStation 3 online offering. From the article: "Co-developed by Sony Online Entertainment, the company's MMORPG development arm, and GameSpy Networks, the PlayStation Network Platform will allow players to compete online even in its free iteration, unlike Xbox Live. Sony will enforce integrated online capabilities between games, but publishers will be free to run their own servers." The folks on the 1up podcast were just talking about this topic last week. I'm personally not sure 'free' is the way to go. I'm willing to pay if it means I'm getting a quality service. Obviously you'd prefer not to pay but if it means the difference between an unreliable service and one the quality of Xbox Live, are you willing to pay?

Comments

Great analysys, 1up!

[cluke]

What the hell is the world coming to, when you announce something is going to be free, and people start whining that they want to pay for it? Big business has us well trained.
Maybe in some parallel universe where paying for something improves the quality of it, but here in the real world comapnies just do the minimum they need to muddle through, fee or no fee.

Re:Great analysys, 1up!

[Anonymous Coward]

People (often) assume that a company is forced to charge them to offer a service because it would be too costly to provide a similar service for free; this is obviously false. The truth is that depending on how a company decides to implement the service is what determines what charges are required.

XBox live is a very closed service where all of the servers are hosted by Microsoft and all communication is transmitted from an individual client to the server (or vice versa) including all game data as well as voice communication; this means that Microsoft has to host tons of servers (for every game available on XBox Live) each having adequate bandwith for the users; (add on top of this massive data storage to hold all types of stats on a persons game history and movie preferences and favourite ice-cream flavour and you end up with a very expensive service.

In contrast you could set up a service which simply acts as a meeting place (with a Peer-to-Peer voice communication set-up), uses virtual-lan, master-slave, or developer hosted servers, and eliminates all extra data storage. This would be a much cheaper system to maintain (possibly able to be free) and could contain many of the same features.

Free vs. Pay

[matr0x_x]

It's a tough debate. I like many would prefer to pay for a good service then receive a sub-par service for free. However, I'd also rather receive a crappy service for free then pay for it. Do you think the Playstation network will be good if it is subscription based? Then I for one don't mind paying for it...

Overseas

[n3tcat]

Being stationed in Germany, without any stateside addresses to reference, I'm stuck without Live, as they don't take overseas billing addresses. Or at least didn't several months ago before I got sent to the litter box.

If they can workout online entertainment that works regardless of location, I'm all for it, pay or no. If I can sit here in my tent and hook my PS3 into the net and game back with the states, more power to them. If not, then it doesn't really make much difference to me since I won't be back in the states until Sep '07.

Actually, with the way things are looking, the PS3 won't be out till then for us anyways...

Re:SOE Warning

[Anonymous Coward]

OE's hosting is pretty good so i'm not sure that's the cause of any unusual amount of lag in the game (i havent played the game so i wouldn't know)

Actually, SOE's hosting sux cox. They recently had a problem where all SWG players were running into massive latency, to the point of the game being unplayable. Their initial and repeated response was "It's not our fault". It took like 2 months for them to grudgingly agree to look into it. I stopped following it a while ago, but last I checked it was never resolved.

Not to mention their inability to report server status. You load up one of their games, and it says "All servers online". When you actually log in, you find them all offline, or loading, or "internal only".

Odd choice by Sony

[the computer guy nex]

With XboxLive as a main selling point of the 360 I'm suprised Sony didn't just mimic every aspect of the system.

With a free system can you:
1) Download 500mb-1g demos
2) Download HighDef movie trailors
3) Send Voice/Text messages
4) Videoconference
5) Have a 'friends' list with friend leaderboards?

This sounds like what PS2 had - basically just a network connection and then each Developer could do whatever they wanted. Since they have to build most of the online system from the ground-up it makes each online game pure crap.

Why scramble?

[the computer guy nex]

"Free online play is where Sony and Nintendo are at. Microsoft better scramble to come up with an answer."

I would rather have 8% of my customers paying me $5 per month than have 25% of my customers playing online when I have to pay for all the bandwidth, hardware, and development costs.

Quality of XBox Live?

[Trogre]

I'm personally not sure 'free' is the way to go. I'm willing to pay if it means I'm getting a quality service. Obviously you'd prefer not to pay but if it means the difference between an unreliable service and one the quality of Xbox Live, are you willing to pay?

Well, any lingering hope that Zonk might not be a Microsoft shill just flushed noisily down the gurgler.

So Sony is now doing bad for offering a service for free huh? Talk about damned if you do...

Why not just ask "if paying money means the difference between an unreliable operating system and one the quality of Windows, are you willing to pay?"