This plan seems to have pros and cons. It looks great for massively multiplayer games, since they appear to all be covered under the XBox Live subscription. That way, players won't have to pay separate fees for each game, and they won't have to deal with canceling subscriptions if they get tired of a game.

However, it appears players won't be able to take the XBox online unless they subscribe to XBox Live. For people who don't want to play multiplayer online RPGs, subscription fees are unheard of. They'll be paying $10 per month for patches to games and a matchmaking service. These things are free on PCs.

The PS2 online plans will offer free matchmaking for most games, but seperate subscription fees for games like massively multiplayer games like FFXI and Star Wars (Everquest on PS2 appears to be free).

Also, The PS2 obviously won't be able to support patches and add-on downloads.

Personally, I'm kind of averse to subscription fees myself. I'm happy about free matchmaking on PS2 for games that are played client to client, but I'll probably skip FFXI.

Actually it's $5 a month. The modem of PS2 is $50 right?

FFXI actually requires the use of a hard drive I thought? Maybe I am thinking about old articles, but either way, the PS2 will use patches and whatever else they give you to download. They are releasing the HDD for $80. The Network Adapter is $40.

You know, I have an entire thread dedicated to the online plans of each system found here:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...hreadid=207793

That thread goes into very descriptive detail about the XBox Live service.

Also, you have made a few mistakes, Scandal.

For the first 12 months, the price is $49.99 for XBox Live. That includes the XBox headset communicator and a copy of Re-Volt. It's boils down to a little over 4 bucks a month. After that first 365 days, the cost will be a monthly fee that has yet to be finalized.

Also, here are some features you left out for XBox Live:

1. Stat tracking and Online rankings.
2. Structured Tournaments
3. Episodic downloads. For instance, Toe Jam and Earl will offer downloadable levels and objects.

As far as the PS2 games are concerned, all 1st party games are currently free. 3rd parties will have free reign over charging consumers if they so shoose.

For instance, Sega will be charging PS2 owners a monthly fee to play their entire libary of sports games online. Adversely, Sierra won't be charging a dime for people to play Tribes online.

If FFXI does, in fact, require the hard drive, Square is going to go bankrupt on it.

Which is probably fine for PS2 fans, because then Sony will bail them out like they did after Square nearly lost the house on their movie, and Square will become a Sony second party.

Wow. Free PS2 Everquest. Sounds fun.

Anyway, stat tracking and rankings isn't a huge deal. Battle.net does that for free, and so does Westwood online for Command and Conquer. You can save your record on a PS2 memory card.

Nothing pre-empts PS2 games from having tournaments, of course. Once again, Microsoft is trying to charge for something Battle.net players have had for free since Starcraft.

The downloads are something that only XBox can do. The plus side of that is that developers can add a lot of value to the games, and increase the game worlds through downloads. The best case scenario is that Microsoft and developers might make it possible for people to develop mods like Team Fortress or Counterstrike for XBox. This could be a major feather in Microsoft's cap.

However, the skeptical perspective is that this will introduce one of the biggest frustrations of PC gaming to consoles. Developers will be able to be lazy, releasing incomplete, unbalanced, or buggy games, because they can fix them later with a patch.

The $49.99 is very reasonable for a year of service and a communicator, especially since the PS2 network adaptor will cost nearly that much. I don't think most players will think ReVolt adds much value to the package, but it was nice of MS to throw it in.

The question is, what happens after a year? If the system war is getting intense, and MS needs market share, they may just make the whole thing free. That would be a heck of a boost for them. But if it's $9.95 a month, then who's going to be on XBox Live after a year?

Most people who have broadband service are PC gamers, and they're accustomed to getting online features for free with most games. I'm wondering if this audience will want to keep putting money into XBox Live.

I definitely don't like how Microsoft is requiring all online XBox games to play through the service, instead of allowing developers flexibility to implement online gaming as they want to. I don't think Microsoft has much chance of dominating the online gaming scene, but it looks like they're trying to. XBox owners should perhaps be concerned about this. MS certainly doesn't need to give developers more incentive to be PS2 exclusive.

The upside, of course, is that XBox Live is broadband only, so it will probably have the smoothest online play. Broadband users will certainly be happy not to have 56K users lagging up the games. However, Microsoft is only putting up one North American data center, and it's in Seattle. Maybe this will prove to be a non issue, or maybe service for East Coast users will suffer. That remains to be seen.

I much prefer Sony's laissez faire approach to online gaming. I think it encourages third parties to provide free games instead of charging. For example, it will be hard to sell an online RPG for $10 per month when Everquest is free (poor Square). Likewise, if Sega tries to charge for their sports games, and EA gives theirs away, who do you expect to sell more copies?

Your forgetting one thing. Every game has to go through Microsoft Quality Assurance before it can be released. If Microsoft wants to avoid this problem (which I'm quite sure they do), they can.

Did Kabuki Warriors go through Microsoft Quality Assurance?

I'm not so sure that Everquest will be free. The initial first-party games will be free but I believe Sony left open the possibility of charging for games in the future. As for EA, they plan to charge for their online sports games, as well. I think it's actually more likely that third-parties will charge for online since they will be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure for their games. That costs money which has to come from somewhere. So far, every third-party I've heard of plans to charge (Square, EA, Sega).

Why, yes it did. Unfortunately, they aren't checking for subjective quality. They're only looking for bugs and errors in the code. Besides, every console needs their version of 'E.T.'!

The XBox will have around 30 to 40 online games by then. 50 by the end of the 2003. IMO, it will be well worth the cost compared to the combined cost of the games on competitor's systems.

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I definitely don't like how Microsoft is requiring all online XBox games to play through the service, instead of allowing developers flexibility to implement online gaming as they want to.

Actually, smaller developers will benefit from MS's plan. If they don't have the resources or manpower to create and run their own servers, online network, etc, they can add online features and let MS do all the work. Then they can move on to their next game.

It's the larger developers that you are refering to. EA is the only on that has been vocal about it.

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I much prefer Sony's laissez faire approach to online gaming. I think it encourages third parties to provide free games instead of charging. For example, it will be hard to sell an online RPG for $10 per month when Everquest is free (poor Square). Likewise, if Sega tries to charge for their sports games, and EA gives theirs away, who do you expect to sell more copies?

Where is this free Everquest announcement? IGNPS2 is assured of a monthly charge:

http://ps2.ign.com/articles/358/358040p1.html

Also, EA reps at E3 are quoted as saying a monthly package charge, similar to Sega's plan, is in the works for the PS2 and Gamecube. Madden, or course, will be free until more games with online play capabilites are released.

tamrock, where did you see that ea was going to charge for online use? I have not seen that anywhere and it goes against what they do on pc so it makes no sense to me.

Evercrack most definitely won't be free. Where is this misinformation coming from?

I'm guessing EA sees nothing like the volume that will occur when the PS2 Madden stuff goes live. They probably see what they did on the computer as a trial run. Most definitely they will charge unless they have money to burn.

Nevermind. Gamespy was wrong and they've changed their preview information.

Good point. EA's console sports games are far ahead of PC sports titles in terms of units sold.

Madden 2001 for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 sold more than 2 million units. I can imagine Madden 2002 has probably sold that many on the Ps2 alone. That would put it at a conservative 25% attach rate with U.S. PS2 owners.

If say a conservative 20%, of those U.S. Madden 2003 owners decide to go online, we are talking about 450,000 online players. That's alot more bandwidth than Madden 2003 on the Pc will ever take up.

Also, I'm sure EA wants to include some of the same features as MS will for NFL Fever 2003 and Sega will for NFL 2K3. That will require a heck of a network to handle it all. And it won't be cheap.

EA is a pretty good sized game company . I'm sure they've got the resources to manage it if they so desire. They've been operating Ultima Online and Majestic as well as the free servers for their existing PC games so they've got the expertise and networks in place. The marginal cost of supporting console players may be very substantial, but it could turn out to be wortwhile for them to provide online gameplay for free if it wins them market share from Sega.

The IDSA did a survey the results of which were published in a Reuters piece earlier this week. This is from a Forbes story that mentions it:
http://www.forbes.com/business/newsw...rtr611996.html

For smaller companies, the idea of supporting online play is certainly more daunting. Depending on the game, however, it may be pretty easy to outsource the hosting of the online play. Earlier today, slashdot mentioned these guys who have basically set up a huge cluster that can provide virtual servers for online games:

http://www.supercomputergaming.com/index.php?p=home

I'm pretty sure that I recently read about another company (in San Diego?) that was providing a similar service. Of course someone's gotta pay for these services, but there are flexible ways to handle it such that the consumer wouldn't get nickeled and dimed to death.

Here's a fairly good article at CNet that provides some insights to some of the concerns that game publishers have:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-922435.html?tag=cd_mh

I don't know even if Microsoft were to charge 10 bucks a month I don't see it as a big cost at all. I don't want to have to worry about which games will charge and which won't. I have played Diablo and Starcraft for free and I still don't find it offensive that Microsoft would charge. I find it much simpler to have to worry about one payment.

I don't really know enough about XBox Live yet in order to say so for sure, but I'm guessing that there may be additional fees above and beyond the basic XBox Live subscription cost. So, you may be required to pay additional fees that depend on which games you want to play online anyway.

Most people seem to be assuming that the $50 for the first year or the $9.95/month fee thereafter is all that anyone will ever have to pay in order to play all online XBox games. I haven't seen MS state that this is the case and my guess would be that it isn't.

If it were, that means that total revenue for online XBox gameplay would be capped at $50 per subscriber per year for the first year and $120 per subscriber per year thereafter (if we assume the $9.95 per month fee that everyone seems to be guessing). Somehow I can't see that appealing to the game publishers at all.

If someone could provide a link to more detailed information, I'd appreciate it, because I don't think that most of us know the whole story about XBox Live yet.

I don't see how this will. First, the game publishers will not have access to the userbase which is a drawback to them. Then, the publishers have to share that estimated $10 a month fee. Since there are so many fewer xbox owners and only broadband is available for xbox which will also limit the number of users on the system, how are they going to make enough money to publish online games for the xbox? It would be better to go make games for Sony and charge whatever you like and get all the online fee for yourself and have a larger userbase to work with. Personally, I don't play games enough to get into this pay to play idea.

1. They won't share that $10 fee because they aren't doing any of the work. All they do is add the online features and then move on to the next game. Microsoft will be deploying and managing the servers.

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Since there are so many fewer xbox owners and only broadband is available for xbox which will also limit the number of users on the system, how are they going to make enough money to publish online games for the xbox?

2. At E3, MS said over 50% of XBox owners have broadband. In the U.S., 50% would be 1 million XBox owners with broadband. Let's be conservative and say only 25% of those broadband users will connect to XBox Live. That's 250,000 people at the initial signup. That seems like alot to me just to start.

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It would be better to go make games for Sony and charge whatever you like and get all the online fee for yourself and have a larger userbase to work with.

3. Only if they want to mess with setting up and monitoring servers, customer service, a billing department, etc. That's a big undertaking for any console developer, big or small, even if they outsource like Belboz said.

I would be surprised if 250,000 people signed up at the startup of xbox live. Time will tell but that seems like too many people for something so new. If they get no money from the service, why bother doing it? It may take more effort to get the servers up and running and to maintain them, and get money from people, but it would be worth the effort since they could potentially take the game from $50 actually $40 for Sony's games, and make them into $160-$170 a year per person. I know that as a casual gamer I wouldn't play it enough to drop $10 a month so the only online gaming I would do is possibly a free football game once in awhile. If none of the football games are free, I will just play at home with friends or family or by myself.

I'm afraid you've contradicted yourself. On the one hand, you state that you can't understand why Microsoft would go through with Xbox Live when (in your opinion) they won't make any money charging only $9.95/month. Then, you claim that it's a good idea for Sony third-parties to go ahead and set-up the servers and maintain them so they can make extra money on top of the original $40-50 game price. So let me get this straight. It's a good idea for third-parties to do this but it's a bad idea for Microsoft to do this? We're talking about the same amount of money here. In one case, Microsoft is setting up the servers and charging for it. In the other case, third-parties are setting up the servers and charging for it. The difference is that with Microsoft's plan, you only pay one fee but with Sony's plan, you could potentially pay many different fees to many different companies.

If it doesn't use the hard drive, it would suck, because eventually there will be a bug with something and they have no way of fixing it. And they can never add new features to the game unless they release another addon disc which will cost people money to purchase, and most likely painful disc swapping. All MMORPG's need the hard drive. Square won't go bankrupt because of the hard drive. The people that really want to play it will understand that they need to get a hard drive.

The PS2 is very capable of this. FFXI downloads patches through Square's Playonline service whenever one is available when you log on to the game. And in the future, they can add new areas to the world, or even new classes or races, and it will be easy to download them into the hard drive. Again, this is expected for all MMORPG's. Everquest on the PC alone has downloaded over 100 patches since it has been released several years ago. I'm sure Sony will support the downloading of patches for any of their games that utilize the hard drive.

Tamrock, I was saying that it doesn't make sense for the third parties to make online games for the xbox if they will not get any money off it whereas they can make more money selling to Sony's larger user base and getting the fee's themselves.