[quote name='dpatel']I am wondering what exactly the money is going towards for XBL. If it is just the dedicated servers, then it won't be too hard to replicate XBL (we just won't have the advantage of dedicated servers).
Everything else shouldn't really cost money. I honestly don't know though, maybe someone can shed some light as to what the money for XBL is for.[/quote] bandwidth, it's not cheap. especially reliable bandwidth. thats not to say PSN is unreliable, its far to young to even tell yet. just saying that in general guaranteed datacenter uptime is a lot more expensive.
[quote name='dpatel']And as far as being only free because its ad supported, the current PSN does not have ads and has a lot of the features of Live. It just has a big problem with actually standardizing these features and implementing them into games. However, I don't think this is a result of the service being free, its more of a result of Sony not being as aggressive about their online plan to developers as MS.[/quote] one of the advantages of MS hosting all the games is developers have that standardization, and the global communication is painless. for PSN to match it they would have to support redundancy & build a constant bridge to all the servers instead of just handing off players. thats an expensive thing to do & it will incur recurring costs which will be hard for sony to eat even w/ ad support.
[quote name='reiji']You did see the Virtual PSP, right? Your avatar has a PSP that gives you an XMB menu of all of the features of Home. If you don't want to walk to your destination, you won't have to. You can just use the PSP to access everything.[/quote] everything except the two things i would have liked instead of the 3d world. global & better matchmaking.
[quote name='Apossum']like you said, it's ad and microtransaction supported. it's not like these 2 things don't equate to boatloads of cash.
If enough people get into it, money won't be a problem--companies will pay a shitload to have their ad seen by every single person that owns a PS3 (this will become more relevant when sales pick up, obviously.) A shirt for your avatar that cost jack shit to create and host could bring in $100 grand after a ton of people buy it.
they can do it, we just have to hope they're going to make it very enticing for devs to integrate their games with it.[/quote] it all depends. the ads wont be simple flash or banner ads like on a webpage. according to them its HD video; thats extremely bandwidth intensive. unless they were just BSing. im inclined to believe they were since it would pretty much restrict its usability to any1 w/ a 10+Mb/s connection. the video will probably be DLed in the background and just looped when you enter. as for the microtranactions, i see that plan as failing miserably. imo console users dont have the same mindset as those mmorpg addicts who will spend real $ for virtual stuff to brag about. they tend to be more casual gamers who just turn the machine on for an hour or two to race some friends or kill aliens.
[quote name='NamPaehc']Also I wonder how this might effect multiplayer games. With the streaming video, we might see live viewing of games as they are happening. It would be great if they hosted tournaments with live announcers where you sat around in the gaming lounge, talking trash and waiting for your turn to race while watching others zooming around a track.
He mentioned "pets in the future". Hope you don't have to buy food for them!
[/quote] that would be cool, but i dont see it ever happening. i really dont see how they can stream that much video either. imo the only video actually being streamed would be that little feature where you put the little bravia down and stream something. but ill wait and see on that. i have a feeling its not going to work well considering how, especially in the US, broadband upload speeds are pretty meager & its probably a distributed bandwidth implementation. the large video in the lounges is most likely DLed while once in awhile while the previous one is looped. which also makes me wonder how much hard drive space it will take. they'll want to cache the ads for a while so they dont have to keep sending them to you 'cause bandwidth=$.
& lol at buying the pets food. im not sure the US would fall for that, but japan just might considering its where tamogotchis came from