Yeah, something similar to that will happen on the PSN when HOME is introduced (it’s in a 2nd beta phase in North America at the moment) and Sony start charging users who will get better online content than those who don’t pay.

As Sony said, the PSN will always be free but if you pay an annual subscription, you will be rewarded with extra content. I don’t think that HOME will be available to people who don’t have a subscription. If it is, they will have an extremely cut down version.

One thing that XBL has over the current PSN, is the quality of their online gaming servers. Once subscriptions are introduced on the PSN, gamers will have access to these similar better, faster servers.

If you have a PS3, you will notice changes to the current PSN Store in April. There should also be a new firmware out at the same time. All of this should happen before GTA4 is released, so I’d say early to mid April.

Regardless of any fanboism their are certain things that MS and Sony have strengths and weaknesses in.

Sony have always made great hardware, just look at their TV’s. Their software on the other hand has always been a bit rubbish and buggy (Sony Connect, ect).

MS with the rrod problems have shown they have a lot to learn as far as hardware. But being the worlds largest software company the 360 OS is almost faultless.

Live has a central ‘gamertag’ that collects all your gaming data in a way that allows you to compare with your friends. The gamertag lists all your friends, allows personal messaging, voice chat outside games, a gamerscore based on game achievements, a star rating based on pos/neg reviews. The os has something called ‘blades’ that seperate the different sections. One of these is the marketplace that allows you to download free demos, buy game content, buy arcade games, rent HD movies and loads of other stuff.

I don’t have any experience with the PS3 software.

Blu-ray will not appear on the 360 due to:

- the expected arrival of the next M$ console in November 2009;
- only 3% of the 360 user base bought the HD DVD add-on;
- they would also p!ss off the 360 premium & (especially the) elite owners if they brought out yet another SKU;
- M$ can’t use BD for games just as they couldn’t use HD DVD;
- 360 doesn’t support HDMI 1.3/1.3a so it can’t take advantage of the features (mainly audio) which are inherent in the PS3/stand alone Blu-ray players.

Blu-ray is as much of a Sony format as is DVD and CD. M$ need permission from the BDA, not just Sony as M$ wasn’t involved in creating the Blu-ray standard.

With Blu-ray just (officially) winning the HD format war, do you think that M$ or any other organization/group are going to get another form of optical media in peoples homes (by the millions) in the next 2-5 years? How do you think that we, the consumers would react to another format being touted as the next best thing when Blu-ray’s potential has not been tested. DVD was successful but PC and 360 gamers can see the limitations when games start to appear on 2-4 DL DVD’s or when content is left out because it can’t hold on a disc.

So with a new console due out next year, I would say that M$ is losing the console war with the 360. They rushed to launch a console before Sony and it has suffered massive problems which have only just been fixed although it has been very successful for them. M$ still need to conquer the Japan/China region and they are failing miserably at the moment. Sales in the UK have dropped and the PS3 is picking up. We will have to wait and see how the new price drop in the 360 (Arcade has been confirmed, not sure about Premium/Elite) affects sales over the new few months.

I owned a 360, it went RRoD, then sent it back, got my replacement, and that, within a month, went RRoD as well….so, I’m kinda pissed that they gave me a 2006 model (the defective kind).

Befored they go off exploring frontiers with BluRay, they should work on their landscape with RRoD’ed customers.

Just a rental service at the moment.

As far as positives and negatives I can only really comment on the 360 at the moment.
On the negative side i’ve had two failures, one was a faulty drive caused by me knocking it over that was replaced instore the other a rrod that was covered by MS warranty and fixed within two weeks (pretty easy process).
On the positive it was cheap as anything at launch compared to other consoles and with a VGA cable could be used with a PC monitor. Plenty of great games and the online Live service is beyond great, even allowing HD movie downloads.

For all the people who rely on nothing but technical specs to review a GAMES console, if that was the most important thing we’d all be playing gaming PC’s.

i have 360 its ok, like a reasonable pc running well , and some games look fantastic at 1080p on my tv. I’d rather have a ps3 any day of the week cept there no ixtreme for it and no blu-ray burner L((

but personally i likes the wii

whatelse can play games and controll ableton live

simply respex
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