No Seamless On-line Experience for PS3 Owners
Up until now Sony’s on-line plans for the PS3 has been largely unknown, heck it still is very cloudy even after this last news blast.
Basically it boils down to the fact that PS3 owners will not have a seamless on-line experience. It could very well be that PS3 gamers will have to juggle multiple accounts and friend lists. One for Sony’s Playstation Network and now this xFire middleware plus whatever else comes down the pike. Beyond that pale, what about costs? It’s not free to do on-line gaming. Someone has to pay for servers, bandwidth, upkeep, etc.. With no central, standard system on which to build your on-line enabled game, what are developers to do? It wouldn’t surprise me that multiplayer games on the PS3 will incur some type of subscription service that that subscription won’t cover every game you shove into your PS3; it’d be game to game. That’d be a shame.
Ozymandias made a great point regarding this (emphasis, mine):
The bad news? This definitely isn’t what Sony would have wanted to do if they had other options. What we end up with is a bit of a mishmash of online accounts, logins, and services. For example, now when I play a PS3 title I simply can’t depend on having a single Friends list. Sony will manage the “master” list, which should have presence in every PS3 title, and Xfire will be a plugin that some publishers integrate into some games. This means gamers can’t depend on finding their friends in one place (if the game even supports Xfire). The possibility exists that Sony might do a larger deal to integrate Xfire into every PS3 title, but frankly, they should have simply swallowed their pride and purchased Xfire a long time ago and made it their default backend technology.
I totally agree with his assessment. It’s something I’ve said before regarding all the unknowns about the PS3 (just check out my Sony and PS3 categories). Sony doesn’t get on-line or community. Microsoft has set the bar very high for the seamless on-line experience. So high, I fear that anything else will pale in comparison.
I’m glad Sony’s at least trying to provide some sort of on-line access, but if I spent $500 or $600 on a console, I’d be expecting quite a bit. Yes, they can continue to improve the service over time but that’s just it; out-of-the-gate you already have a system that’s not seamless. Games will be released utilizing other means of getting gamers on-line, but it all won’t be happening under one on-line umbrella. Maybe later they can standardize, but it’s too bad that it won’t be seamless from the get-go. Heck, we haven’t even seen the thing work and we’re about a month out from launch.