| shio said: I think it's the social aspects and community features of Xbox Live that's establishing the brand of the Xbox. Xbox Live is currently the strongest digital service on consoles. No doubt there will be several gamers that will stick with Microsoft just because they don't want to lose their achievements/gamerscores, regardless of whether the service sucks or not. We are already seeing that with the hundreds of thousands of Xbox owners that still back X360 despite RROD failure. There was some guy on Neogaf that had his Xbox 360 die 12 times! And he still comes back to the Xbox. But I think Microsoft might face a serious problem later: since Xbox Live requires subscription it will gain "full" members far slower than Sony's PSN and Nintendo's whatever, and if Sony/Nintendo do up the quality of PSN/whatever, then Xbox Live could be "royally screwed". This is about who wins the "Social Gaming" race. |
That's really interesting and correct I think. The problem with the PS3 I think is that it doesn't have a true sense of an avatar. Sure you have Home, and people on both 360 and PS3 deride the Mii copies, but still you don't have a unified avatar for PS3. There's Home, LBP, the little icon you can get, etc. I have 3 alt. accounts (US, Japan, UK), and although I do have a main account, and trophies on it, I don't really feel that much of an attachment (but then again, I don't care about trophies/achievements in general).
I think that if Sony needs a system seller for the next game, it has to be a Socom type game, that gets people involved online like Halo/Socom did.
Microsoft, has the advantage in that people with PS2's didn't really get immersed into the online community aspect, and so they never established the commitment, attachment, and loyalty they have to LIVE and the friends they have on the network.
