| S.T.A.G.E. said: Of course you need online, but since Sony struggled to add it to the PS3 we learned later that it is a feature based on hardware specs being dedicated to its existence and certain amounts of power being freed up to realize its existence. |
No, Sony could have implemented cross-party chat, but to do so would have required setting aside memory. Which, at one point there was more than enough reserved for the OS to do so. However, Sony weighed the benefits of giving gamers cross-party gaming, or giving developers more memory for games. They went with the latter, reducing the amount of memory utilized by the OS to 50MB from 120MB. Had they believed gamers would have wanted cross-party chat over better games, they would have gone with the former.
You're looking at the situation from hindsight, and they didn't come to that decision in hindsight. Just like the removal of backward compatibility Sony made a concious choice to not do something because the PS3 was such a badly architeched device.
People can argue that the Xbox 360 had the RRoD, but the RRoD could be engineered out of the Xbox 360 with a few modifications and reducing the die size and power consumption. The PS3's problems couldn't be engineered out because they were intergral to the nature of the device. The poor design and planning of the PS3 is something that isn't debateable. It's what it is.
