HappySqurriel said:
Sony is a hardware developer, and their focus is on producing the "best" hardware in a very limited and linear interpretation of what makes hardware better. You can expect a very advanced feature rich system, but it is often unimaginative and can be lacking in ways that did not fall into the engineer's definition of "best hardware" Microsoft is a service company, and uses ease of development and technical support to sell their hardware to developers while trying to sell additional services to the gamer through the system. This also tends to be not extremely imaginative, but their focus on developers does lead to a significant attempt to meet their needs; and also leads to gamers being treated like "cash cows" to be steadily milked. To make matters worse, it usually takes people a long time to adopt to services and by the time people care that a service exists your competition may have adapted. As an example of what I mean, Online gameplay is a very important feature for a minority of gamers but has not become a particularly important service to most gamers yet; and even Nintendo (a snail in the race to online gaming) will probably have a service most people deem adequate by the time it becomes a very important feature for most gamers. The same will (probably) be said about digital distribution and social networking services provided by consoles. |
are we having an argument?
i'd have to say i agree with all of your points save one...i think online is already a very important feature. in the console ecosystem live and psn are already very big services to with a majority of the market (when measured in dollars not people) care very much about.
when you leave that ecosystem for the smartphone, pc, or facebook platforms connectivity is every more predominant and important.