...and so, the online war begins.

[Johnny Awesome]

Thanks for proving my point. MS is collecting revenue for services. Sony isn't. That's going to be hard for Sony to start doing after establishing their flawed model in the minds of PS2 online users.

What do you get with Xbox Live for $50:

Moto GP, Whacked! demos
Headset communicator
Unique Gamertag across all games w/stat tracking
Unified billing and ease of transaction
Some server hosted games - Unreal Championship being one example
Some free downloadable content (Unreal, Splinter Cell, Brute Force, Roster updates so far)
Player matching services and invites between different games
Rock solid security - ie. no gamershark codes or you will get kicked off

No doubt they will add user email and possibly voice mail to the list of services later this year, as well as official tournaments with a standardized interface.

In other words, $50 is a fair price. Try hooking up with your friends that live in another city to play Madden without voice on PS2. Not exactly great compared to constant chatter in Unreal Championship. Roleplaying games will be even better with the mandatory voice-over-IP.

Also, the fee after the first year hasn't been decided. My guess is that it will be $50 again next year, rather than a monthly billing, and they'll probably throw in some demos like Halo 2, and PGR 2 just to wet those appetites. 8)

 

[Geeforcer]

Sony is actually hosting servers for games, Xbox live is making you pay for Peer to Peer(only a select few games on Xbox live are hosted by MS, and very few of the servers are supplied on the games that are..)
what exactly are you paying for?

So you are basically saying that MS is getting money for nothing? Not a bad business model.

 

[speng]

Sony leaves the pricing up to the folks who build the game.

A company can now charge $5 per month or anything they want for their online service. Microsoft went the other route charging for pretty much being on the network. Some people will be less likely to want to pay another monthly fee, to play online for subscription games (Asheron's Call 2 etc).

So both ways have their drawbacks, Sony gets no money up front but developers have a bit more freedom, and sony can get money from royalty fees.

What Sony is missing for more penetration has to do with the games. PSO was a large part of Sega's success online.

Sony needs a game or 2 that is compelling enough to make people want to play it online. Is Everquest Online Adventures the game? Not sure, but if they allow more developers the chance to create games, the possibilities of a great game coming out increase.

Speng.

 

[Mark Cicero]

Here's some current information on internet connectivity to keep the rhetoric away from the lovely grandiose statements of knowledge that everyone enjoys. I'm going to keep looking for some European statistics but seeing as none of this relates to anything I'm supposed to be doing at the moment it might take a day or two.

United States of America
According to the most recent report, “Most individuals who use the Internet at home make that connection via a regular “dial upâ€￾ telephone line (80.0 percent), with cable modems being the second most common way to connect (12.9 percent), followed by DSL (6.6 percent).â€￾ These numbers however show an increase of 116% usage rate of broadband connectivity over a 13 month period. This in turn has been a result of an overall increase in broadband availability. “The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported high-speed subscribers were present in 75 percent of the nation's zip codes at the end of December 2000 as compared to 56 percent at the end of 1999. The deployment of broadband occurred first in higher density areas. According to the FCC, high-speed subscribers were present in 97 percent of the most densely populated zip codes at the end of December 2000 as compared to 45 percent of zip codes with the lowest population densities.â€￾ They also report a significantly higher adoption rate (in the years since introduction 8% by 2001) than most other technologies (color television, cell phones, pagers, and VCRs). The unit with the next highest rate of adoption was the vcr.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. A Nation Online: How Americans Are Expanding Their Use of the Internet. February 2002. Internet. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/html/anationonline2.htm Date Accessed: 26 Feb, 2003.

See also: The report’s homepage with links to the census bureau numbers. http://www.esa.doc.gov/508/esa/nationonline.htm

Canada
The following are statistics from the Canadian Cable Television Association (btw this is where Statistics Canada gets its current information on the issue since the general computer use survey only has one question about method of connection and that is “do you use a telephone line?â€￾ which has a higher non-response rate than a yes or a no answer).

Year | Number of Cable Modem Customers | Homes with Access to Cable Modem Service (millions)
2001 | 1,575,000 | 7.8
2000 | 930,000 | 7.4
1999 | 479,000 | 4.8
1998 | 161,000 | 4.3
1997 | 21,000 | 1.8
Source: CCTA Publications: Annual Report, 2001. http://www.ccta.ca/english/publications/annual-reports/2002/index.htm

The current number of households in Canada is 11,562,975 (2001 Census) http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/famil53a.htm

 

[Glonk]

Easy, not all of the States are compactly developed. There aren't Cable offices or phone switchers (DSL) in every town.

AFAIK most of Canada's population is pretty concentrated, unlike the US which is incredibly spread out with a few majour localisations in a handful of big cities and the rest all over the place.

That's really not a viable excuse.

Look at Alberta: 3M people, area larger than the size of California.

The provincial government is guaranteeing broadband access to every citizen in the province by 2004, and the vast majority of everyone has broadband.

Hell, Shaw Cable began offering its "Shaw Wave" cable service in 1997 here.

Population density isn't the only reason, as Alberta shows, since we've got people way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, like the frozen tundra of northern Alberta.

 

[zurich]

Nod Glonk.

And Mark, those stats are just for cable internet, don't forget that Bell's DSL is every bit as popular as Cable service up here. In fact, if I recall correctly, some places out east (Maritimes) _ONLY_ have DSL for broadband, from BT I think? MPower I think its called?

Either way, its good to be Canadian if highspeed internet access is your thing

ps: Glonk, I beta tested Roger's "Wave" service back in 1997 Since then, its been Wave->@Home->Sympatico DSL->Sympatico DSL Ultra.

Wrraaa~!

 

[speng]

Some folks that are remote have wireless, via satellite broadband.

Small portion probably under 1/4 million but substancial when we're talking about a game.

Speng.