I've seen the article before. It's an interesting complaint to say the least, but as the article itself points out the only game for the PS3 that's done this is LBP and that game itself required a lot of specific investment and care and attention from Sony to get working. It's hardly a standard PSN feature.
This is actually the most upsetting development that's happened to the 360, IMHO. I hate the avatars and I hate even more the concept of "premium clothing". It's a hideous abomination and, frankly, a tax on stupid people. I hate that it's come to Xbox Live, and I'm not sure why you would use this as a column in the checkbox of things MS is taking from Home. That's obviously a pretty barren space for an argument, and this is actually one reason I'm very much anti-Home. It's a horrible distraction from gaming, on a gaming system.
Even MMOs?
People don't consider the P2P/server aspects. To 99%+ of users, it just works. The "just works" is key. On the PS3, I can't be playing a game in Resistance: Fall of Man and invite a friend of mine who is playing in LBP to join my match. That's an example of it not "just working", and an example of why XBL has so many paid subscribers.
Actually, business people are stupid. Very, very stupid. As anyone who has worked in corporate environments would attest to.
I'll give you an example. One company I recently worked for had the largest database of people's phone numbers and addresses, and business locations/names/phone numbers/websites/etc in the country. They were a directory publishing company. They actively went to companies like Google and Microsoft to get them to use the data. They ended up <b>paying</b> Google and Microsoft to use them as their data provider for things like Google Maps and Bing Maps. I'm not making this up. They did not comprehend the fundamental value of the data they had, and instead paid other people to use their data for their own services for misaligned business goals (improve brand recognition, increased business ad sales). Business people can, and frequently are, mind-bogglingly stupid. It's why Dilbert is so successful.
You just can't play games with it. MS has no reason to make it free. If they ever do, they can easily do it. It's FAR harder for Sony to introduce a premium tier later than it is for MS to permit Silver to play games later. Sony's marketing explicitly emphasized FREE online gameplay. They may actually be in legal trouble if they take that away. Their hands are kind of tied. All they can do is introduce premium service subscriptions to include things like a useless Qore subscription, maybe 1-2 Sony movie streams a month, etc. Nothing 99% of people would jump at.
