PSN might not have as many features(mainly cross game chat) but the actual service is better...solely because of dedicated servers.

@play2man exactly.

plus if you think about the revenue they're bringing in with Live, they'll be able to improve on the service year to year. By this time next year, Live will have a vast array of improvements--who knows what they'll bring in next!

The fee is worth Netflix to your TV alone, honestly. (...and no more of that, well just run a cord to your PC crap). The interface was built for living room management and enjoyment and the inclusion of it on Live is a step away for the masses from having a PC in the living room.

Name me more than 10 PS3 games that have dedicated servers ? Most of the games that have them are all exclusives.

games do have dedicated servers. bad thing about psn and dedicated servers is once the company shuts them off your screwed. only a few on live have that ability

Both services do dedicated servers and both services do P2P play. It's not up to the service, its up to the developers and publishers.

I use it, and it is overpriced. Quit protecting this crap, psn is not far behind xbl.

If it was overpriced XBL users would be decreasing not increasing

I use it and it is overpriced. Then again I personally dont use most of the features, I just like playing games online. 20$ would be more justifiable for me. I think online play should be free for silver members, Im already paying monthly for my internet connection and they just charge me again to use it.

Personally I dont give a crap what servers it has unless it runs smooth, and it will if you have a good connection. I play on both PSN and Live and I dont really use any features on either I just play games online and do think it should be free for live.

Yea right xbox live is def not worth the money, I know I have all consoles.

*yawn*

seriously. besides a sony fanboy clearly wrote the thing. With quotable gems like, "Microsoft will have effectively stolen money from everyone. Congratulations on getting robbed." and "I wanted to lay out my case that Microsoft is clearly over charging for Live and that some of the downloadable content is nothing more then a money grab. That is not to say Sony is innocent with the PSN, but it is easier to forgive them for that."

...but of course, SDF has to approve any anti-ms stuff, no matter how illegitimate

No, apparently Wii sports wins by your idiot logic

just like no game on the xbox will ever come close to the sales of Gran Turismo.

infact both xbox's put together dont even make the sales of the gran turismo series.

now sit the fck down

XBOX360elite says stupid things all the time, but your reply was equally moronic. Why don't we just go ahead and start shouting about how the Wii and 360 combined don't equal the sales numbers of the PS2? lmao.

But lets be honest, nobody would pay for live and MS would lose tons of money.

^^^

Yes this is true, but with the amount of profit they've already made of Xbox Live, I wish they would be able to do that already.

Hmm..with the amount of profit a lot of people are making this gen, they're still not doing a really good job (coughinfinitycoughwardcoughco ugh)

*ka-ching!*
M$ theevil empire grows even richer.

ya live has features like p2p gaming...its da best /s

and they ignore that the ps3 is neflix/twitter/insert website here compatible

...I'm tired of all the hoopla MS is making over Twitter and Facebook, the PS3 has had access to both through it's browser and sum. Fine, they are both more integrated with Live. I'll take Pornhub over Twitter/Facebook integration any day.

.....live uses dedicated servers for some of it's games like Halo. At least years down the road if you want to play say gears you can since it is P2P but say in 5 years if you want to play KZ2 you may not be able to if GG shuts the servers down.

ANd kapedkrusader, yes you can do netflix and twitter and all on the PS3 browser but lets face it, the PS3 browser sucks ass.

Also, on a serious not, if you stream netflix on your ps3 using its browser can you do in HD? I only ask cause this fall the 360 will start streaming HD not only from its own library but will also be doing so from netflix. I don't think the PS3 browser can do that.

At any rate, I still wonder why people talk up the ps3 web surfing when a pc/mac does it better and really, do you think a main selling point to a console is surfing the web on a crappy console?

Essentially, you're paying $50 USD a year for cross game chat and some other features, which is very cheap when compared to paying $70 USD a MONTH for phone service. Let's not get started on the car payment and insurance...

Would you pay $5.00 for a pencil? Surely not. That's ridiculous.

Comparing the price of your weekly/monthly bill to that of Live doesn't work. Just because you're paying a significantly smaller amount of money doesn't mean that the smaller item's cost is now insignificant.

As for my weird pencil comparison, you know you can get the pencil for a significantly smaller price. After all, the product is known to be cheap in every aspect such as manufacturing. Now we look at an online service. It's not like Microsoft discovered online multiplayer. It's been a service for years and free outside of your ISP's price. Now all of a sudden MS tries to standardize it and charge an amount of money that IS significantly larger than what it had always been ($0.00 versus ~$5.00).

At the end of the day, if it's what you want to spend your money on, go ahead. As for me, it's a matter of principal and being the opposite of ignorant.

I`m eagerly looking forward to that day.

You basically have to pay for future purchases, in the present. And like the author of this article said, prices for downloads, DLC, and the like are rarely priced in the way that a person can easily empty out their MS Point account.

I do believe that alot of people, when they quit the Xbox 360, will have some MS points in their account balances that they will not be able to spend, which means Microsoft will be getting alot of free money from their consumers. And apparently to idiots like shutupandplay, that is all fine and dandy!!! Spread your butt cheeks and let Microsoft right on in, right shutupandplay?

So you agree with PSN's $5 minimum add-to-wallet amount? I guess so. Oddly enough I have $2 and change left on my PSN wallet, and I have 80 MS points right now. Seems like they are both shafting me.

@ The-Warranty - FALSE. That is how I always pay, moron. You have to add the funds to your wallet, then checkout. It automatically will do this if you click to buy something. Do you even own a PS3, or do you just troll on here with no current gen console?

Meh yourr opinion, but facts are the features are about the same on both with one having dedicated servers for free

key word "about the same" that is a fact...

its not just the features but the community live has its just always alive with game nights and special events and stuff psn can be dead at times for a long time with nothing going on as a "community"

you guys seem to think that its just about getting hooked up online, play and thats it.. live goes deeper then that if you ppl just took the time and just experienced it instead of being so heavily influenced by n4g blogs you would know exactly why more ppl pay for live than ppl that sighn up for the free service..

edit...

my point exactly warranty. you sony fanatics just dont know what live is like, other then the stuff you read lol... whats wrong with the community?let me guess you are going to say its full of bad little kids amiright.. live has this thing called a friends list use it if you find your self playing with a bunch of kids then that must say something about you. but thats not what i meant by community anyway, by community i mean that a lot more things go on in live with game nights etc..

if you need a crash course on how live really is and how to avoid kids then esnd me an invite so you can try it out with my clan, assuming live wont break your banking account, lol..

wanted in bpt (360)

wanted_in_bpt (ps3)

Not really influenced by N4g I have played on both and yeah its about the same

and dont go raving about the community because we all know ow the community is on XBL :)

You can get better on PC for sure and like PSN it's free other than your monthly internet charges.

maybe us bots have a ps3 too cause we are not a 1 brand whore.. i got mine for the exclusives nothing more cause we all know how the 360 wins in the multi plats. a great game is a great game no matter what console its on real gamers know that, sony fanatics dont, they just cant see passed that tunnel vision like you shadow..

I have a 360 but IMO the ps3 exclusives set them apart from the comp. Multiplats are on both consoles and can hardly be told apart. Why not prefer the dependable console with the best exclusives??? U can play the same multiplats on it. Man honestly I feel the 360 was a good tie over until the ps3 caught it's stride.

Sorry but the last time i logged in to PSN it didnt have party mode and cross game chat.

grass is green.

Your willing to spend $200.00 - $300.00 on a console but are worried about saving $50.00 a year?

If XBL is whats keeping you from buying a 360 now, then you never had any intention of buying one in the first place. Any 360 owner will tell you that XBL is the 360's most appealing feature.

Dual console owners such as myself dont make fake lame excuses. We actually buy the consoles, play the games, and use the services.

you know the funny part.

theres more people playing Cod 4 on xbox live *WHICH COSTS MONEY* then there are people playing killzone 2, CoD4, Waw, and Res 2 all together on PSN.

funny how that works isn't it?

PS3 fanboys don't care about numbers unless they just got a price cut and are finally outselling the competition. Shhhh....

@Carlton Banks - You really need someone to explain to you why it is better to have more people on your online service than everyone else? That's sad. Even Sony knows better than that.

I'm confused since there is on average 16 players in a match at one time in online games, Why the hell does it matter is there is more people total online.

Oh wait I forgot these guys sure love numbers, lol.

Every game I've played online with my PS3 has been plagued with lag and or slow downloads. I tried to download the batman demo for my PS3 and it took 3x as long as it did when I got it for my 360.

When Microsoft first started live you payed because it was the only way to get more developers to give their games online content. Before then, hardly any games (on consoles) had this feature. Microsoft proved them with a already set up environment so the developers wouldn't have to pay anything to include online play.

With PSN, a developer is responsible for keeping up with their own private servers to allow online play. They pay for this themselves. They can be good or bad. They can also pull these servers whenever they want. I could play Blaze Blue online 5 years from now on my 360 but probably won't be able to on my 360. Heck, I'm still able to play regular xbox games on live. How many PS2 games that were online enabled still have this feature?

My point being, you aren't just paying for voice or universal friends lists. You are paying for faster, more stable, guaranteed service.

@catguykyou

Dude just stop.

PSN supports P2P, player hosted servers just like XBL and in ADDITION fully dedicated servers on YOUR console. Good luck trying to find that capability on the 360.

PSN developers actually have more choices running on the PS3. Also developers don't pay a licensing fees per "dedicated" server on PSN. Something that is required on XBL because the server isn't running on a players machine anymore and therefore can't use the players account to login to Live. Each server requires it's own Live account and MS doesn't give them out for free to developers. So they charge both users and developers for basic functionality on a gaming console.

XBL has no fully dedicated servers running on a 360. They are player hosted servers. Lower player counts and more lag is the result because a single system is trying to run the server portion while someone is also playing the game. Things get dropped a lot more often. That's just a fact of that architecture. You get similar results on PSN game running in that mode for the same reasons(however the PS3 is still able to support more players in that mode due to it's higher bandwidth on the Cell side).

That fully dedicated server mode is why games can handle even more players and do it more smoothly on PSN.

Notice something about the partially "dedicated" servers available on XBL? When you can answer that maybe you will understand why the developers don't bother making fully dedicated servers like PSN devs do. And why XBL is inherently more laggy and has less in-game players compared to 1st, 2nd party PSN dev games. Hint. It's the architecture.

Fully dedicated servers are the most reliable, lag free server possible.

And because PSN developers have allowed any player to set up a fully dedicated server it means your chances of finding a local one are significantly higher than anything on XBL. Making it even less laggy than just a developer created player hosted server. Distributed, fully dedicated servers is a double whammy in PSN's favour. You have clearly never played Warhawk on the fully dedicated servers - including the user ones that have nothing to do with the official servers. Also PSN supports mixing P2P with a full dedicated server for the best optimizations possible.

I actually have played warhawk on a dedicated server. Plays like butter. Warhawk is a big game for Sony. I doubt they would let it run bad. I just find it hard to believe that anyone who has both systems really can say they have had worse lag issue with live then PSN. Look at MGO as a great example. Good luck downloading the patches and fixes for it and once you do, good luck even getting a match going. That is a type of situation that can happen on the PSN. Its not the most common but the PSN architecture allows it.

Live to me at least has provided better stability with a consistent quality of connectivity/playability through all of the games released on it. When I buy a 360 game I don't worry about how it's going to play online. I do with my PS3 and normally have to look into the games reviews first to see what kind of comments it has gotten about its playability online.

And I can buy a whole bunch more with the money I save from not buying a PS3....

I remembered you being a pro 360 defender now you're just looking pathetic and forceful. Oh how has the mighty have fallen defending a piece of sh!t is getting to you huh.

2.1 -
"And I can buy a whole bunch more with the money I save from not buying a PS3...."

You will need that extra money for your yearly Live subscription, hard drive, wireless adapter, AA batteries for your ghetto controller...

then take your money else where, its your choice . No good moaning about it sounds like you prefer the ps3 so the answer is in front of you.

Microsoft takes about 1 game AWAY from you a year in FEES.

Or Sony and Nintendo GIVES you almost 1 game a year for the ABSENCE of those FEES.

Now put that in your hat. Is it related mainly to principle or cost? You decide.

Lol how embarrassing. Do you think I hadn't noticed that it cost the same amount as a game? Your argument is so poor it hurts. Is it cost or principle? It's neither! The cost is negligible and the service is greater than the other 2 consoles...Microsoft don't withhold anything. They charge the price of a game 2 get a premium online service, they don't keep me from buying another game cos if I want both I'll get both...

@devilhunterx

"Well I for one am glad that its $50. For all that content they offer, M$ should raise the price to $100 or even $200.

Cause you know, its worth it right? "

This sound just like this one story where a small petite lady told another lady (3 times her size) that she saw a lobster as big as her leg. The bigger lady went on and told another person that the lobster is as big as her leg, therefore, the lobster size just increase 3 folds. This is a real story by the way....

You really doing the same thing here. Blowing things out of proportion to prove a point or something?

Don't act surprised if M$ charges you $5 every time you turn on the Xbox3

There hasn't been a price increase yet since day one on LIVE.....you may just get your wish.

8 man party chat so that you and your friends can talk about their melodrama and nothing related to gaming (If you think the majority of people use voice chat for anything useful for gaming you are dead wrong.)

Voice messaging so that 13 year old xXn0Sc0perXx can send you a threatening message after you teabag him over and over in a game of halo 3.

Somewhat more advanced Matchmaking so you won't get your arse kicked too badly when you decide to play a game of SF4.

I think i'll stick to PSN. But I can see why people would pay for it if it's the service all thier friends have.

I think with the surge of new PS3 users Sony will be pressured to improve PSN's features.

true dat!

Wow never thought I'd read that from you or is that sarcasm jack?

Jack was quoting what the writer said at the end of this article .

yeah if socom was better or made by zipper...id probably log into my psn..meh its free though what do you expect...live..ahah

Nah, psn has my favorite game of all time. MGO, much better than anything else on the 360 imo. If it doesn't have Metal gear online then it's not worth my time.

Still way too expensive (imo).
For that price, you can have (for exemple) :
TrialsHD, Shadow Complex, Puzzle Quest and Ikaruga! Isnt that fckng better?

although i'm sure every1 want's live to become free i'd say it's actually more likely we'd see sony start charging for psn.

point being, yes some ppl don't pay for live for 1 reason or the other (i'm 1 of them), but i imagine a large number of ppl do, and imagine how much money they're making off them! i'd guess too much to make them wanna stop charging :p

I'm really not sure of that peeps. That there is a lot of people (on 25M machines) who pay to play on it.
You know, i love my 360 and i spend hundreds of hundreds hours on, and i think i will spent even more time on it if the live become free, really, honestly. Andi'm sure i'm not the only one in that case. :)

I have been an XBL member for 6 going on 7 years. They started XBL with the same price tag because at that time it was a new reliable online feature that was only offered by Xbox.

Whats surprising is the fact that MS has not raised the price, but instead kept it the same. You should be praising them for that.

You cannot expect a company to drop the price or even keep it the same when it is overwhelmingly in demand. Especially when there is no other service that offers the same quality and features. That is supply and demand. It may almost be a monopoly..but don't blame MS, blame Sony.
They have the same amount of time to develop online as MS.

i didn't own an original xbox so i don't know anything about LIVE prior to the 360

i do know that all my pc games are free to play online

i do know that when i bought the network adapter for my ps2 all the games i played on it were free to play online..

i know that I shouldn't have to be a live gold member to play the 1943 demo or any online game demo..

First, you just dont understand the principle. You already pay your ISP right? And i suppose you dont pay a tax to browse internet, check your mails or play online on your pc, right?
Second. Youre just lying when you say "that their free service is not nearly as good", you absolutely dont know what youre talking about. ;)

I do. I have a PS3 and 360 and Wii. The PS3 service is slower then live. No question. Free silver account allows you to get demos, watch trailers, have friends, send and receive mail. You pay for gold to get online play of games. Why pay? Well because Microsoft provides the servers for developers instead of forcing developers to pay for them. I pay so 6 years later I can pop in a xbox game and still play it online if I want. I pay for FASTER (yeah, it is and like I said, I DO know) server connections.

PSN is free and for what you pay (nothing) it is a hell of a service. It really is. couldn't ask for more without expecting to pay something. I only see it getting better. To say that it is better then live though? Not for me.

Is there anyone here who actually owns both systems and both services and still feels they get better performance from PSN?

hey kasasensei... first of all i understand the principle better than you..read the post i wrote right before the one you replied to.. With regards to the principle you are talking about, you and other should be thanking MS for not raising the price from the original 6 YEARS AGO.
It was worth $50 dollars then and it is worth more now. I bet you didnt even know what it was 6 years ago, let alone how much it cost and hwo awesome it was.

second...I absolutely do know what I'm talking bout considering I have both 360 and PS3 with both internet services...and I still pay for XBL. Let me repeat myself. THE PSN IS NOT AS GOOD PERIOD. How about you rigorously try both services before talking.

I also second what catguykyou says. Find atleast five people who has both and who thinks that PSN stacks up to XBL.

Sony exclusives....With Live every developer gets to use Microsoft's servers for free. Hell, if you think about it. Assuming that all multi plats sold half and half for both consoles, if Microsoft STOPPED charging and providing servers to all devs for free, than both systems would rely on developers having their own servers lessening the experience for both the PSN and Live users. Because we pay, PSN users have less traffic on their developer owned servers.

$3 per month is infinitely greater than free. I will say again that I think Live is a much more cohesive experience, but no other console maker is charging for the privilege to play online.