PS3 Online: How It Works Comments by Rob Fahey

There's so much talk about Sony's online system, but I've nowhere seen it in action yet, not even at Sony presentations.. So close to launch that makes you wonder.. If it's up & running, why aren't they showing it to us? It would remove a lot of doubts.. Now they are only feeding doubts by not showing anything..

I find it odd that so many people (or maybe just the same ones over and over again) are worried about developers charging their own price to play games (except MMOGs, of course). With the creation of XBL (and thus the concept of a unified matchmaking/chat lobby/friends list, etc.) developers don't have to worry as much about how to create an online service (by 'service' I mean matchmaking & lobbies and basics, not servers to host games). Shouldn't that then, drive developing costs down? Obviously as programming experience is gained on a certain system development costs go down. So now even the online connection is basically part of the system itself. So once you learn how to make a game connect to it once, you don't have to keep rethinking it. Thus, development costs will go down. So why would developers/publishers charge players to play their games online? If they're really trying to offer the best deal to the customer, they wouldn't. It's been free for every non-MMO game I've ever played on my computer and most of those development companies had to create their own in-game browsers (of course you could use gamespy if you wanted for a lot of them but it sucked big time). As for companies offering a service for free and providing a lot of support for it I look in one direction: Guild Wars. It's free, it's got tech support, patches often, adds content often enough to not be boring. On the other hand, it's not a perfect example because I do realize that NCSoft makes plenty of other MMO games that it does charge monthly fees for and I imagine costs are shared.


On the whole cost of anything that offers XBL features in one place:

While I don't agree with paying for an all-in-one online matching/lobby service like XBL, I can see the arguments people are making for its cost. However, what I don't understand is how 360 games are costing $60 when they launch if the developers are getting help from Microsoft (which people say XBL subscription fees help fund) to include online playability. Shouldn't costs be lower? I mean I guess it is fair to say that it is a new system with all the HD goodness so developing costs are going to cost more in the first year and half or two. So I will compromise. In a year, if costs aren't lower for games when they release, I'll wonder what the hell the XBL fee was ever really for. Or I'll wonder why the hell games are still $60 and not $50.

The other thing that pisses me off:

Why do people keep saying that someone has to buy the servers and you'll pay for it somewhere?

Ever heard of competitive gaming? Ever heard of clans? Ever heard of clans needing servers to practice?

I play Battlefield 2 on my PC and practically every server I've ever played on is some clan's server. The clans pay for the server and have the admin ability to boot whomever they choose to make room for a fellow clan member joining the server. With competitive gaming on the rise, I can see this as a growing trend among console games. Granted this model works best with FPSes I imagine that similar models could appear with other genres (though I'm not really sure to what degree).

there online maybe free but i would rather pay for better quality online (xbox live)

When it actually works, and when there are a good list of decent games that use it well - then I'll comment on how good it is.

At the moment, for online play there's hardly anything on the PS3.

In addition to that, we can't trust that there'll be anything much that's playable and populated online on PS3 in a years time, judging from the PS2 and PSP.

Then there's the issue of voice communication, which again is broken or non existent on PS2 & PSP. There are already PS3 games that have online play without voice chat - ridiculous. Is there an official headset? Will Sony promote it? Too many ???s.

I just don't trust Sony's online strategy. I don't trust in their ability to proved this service, due to how poor things have been so far.

They need to prove us wrong and win me over.

I would like to thank whoever it was earlier in this post who spoke about gaminglue. I got my codes in three hours! SFIIHD is finally on my PS3 but I regret buying it now because just 1 day after buying the PSN card, gaminglue had SFIV in stock... Now I have no more money to buy a new game, this really sucks