So spend money to have Valve work on PSN? You want them to spend more money on a free service?

I think Sony rather go the route of Live. Keep getting people to subscribe to PSN Plus and make it a requirement for online play on PS4. More munnies that way.

They should focus on attracting the actual user base foremost and keep the service attractive and transferrable at the same time or the next Nintendo or MS console might destroy it next gen when it happens imo. When you are talking about shooters or FPS, Valve is a big part in it, if the PS3 can have some kind of Steam integration, then it'd be huge in the gaming community, not to mention the ability to actually have xgame chat.

1) Luckily yes, anyway, if I play free P2P I don't pretend to get expensive services from the publisher, even fan sites with links to join games being played can do. And actually it's not the $50-60 to pay that bugs me, it's the fact that on XBox there is no other choice than changing platform. But as I still prefer PC, this issue doesn't really affect me, unless it is extended to other consoles, as I think that sooner or later I could buy a Wii. Actually, another thing that could bug me if I paid a fee, is that my internet connection is quite shaky, so I wouldn't fully exploit what I payed for.

2) If we consider just consoles, it's the most successful, and it has also the financial majority of online revenue, yes, I'm aware of this. On consoles it's a minority just as number of players, but a big and healthy one. I actually meant a minority both as number of players and as revenue including PC too. Quite obviously, if MS is happy with having the most profitable console online service and it doesn't want the numerical majority of users too, Gold is still the solution, my point is only that the numerical majority favours services that get their revenue from selling games and premium services, not basic services too. About this particular issue fact is that they exist two different relevant majorities, depending on whether MS wants to get for its service maximum profit margin (and maximum profit too if we consider consoles only) or if it wants to attract the majorty of users. Maybe I tend to attribute the latter approach to MS because I forget that after becoming sure that Sony wouldn't have conquered the majority of gaming market and grabbed the living room computing market, MS quite changed its behaviour, favouring more profit margin than increasing market share and stopping Sony at any cost.

Why would I want to stop paying for live, for no reason (because this would NEVER take off) when I'm perfectly fine shelling out £40 a year (it's peanuts, really)?

Always made me laugh how much PS3/Wii folk absoloutely HATE Live subscription, if Sony and Nintendo love their fans as much as you all make out, you have nothing to worry about right? and if you like the 360 library, most of the games are on Steam, so just play on steam and quit whining?

I really hope that Sony and Nintendo won't follow with paid online multiplayer model.  As two console owner (maybe soon three) it would literally suck to pay 100-150€ from online multiplayer per year. I just want to play. I don't need other crap like facebook, twitter, last.fm etc features. I have PC for those.

I don't like paying for Live and I own all 3 consoles, if it would result in MS dropping Live's fee, you bet I would stop paying. Unfortunately, there's no real alternate to Live in the console world, PSN is inferior and Wii Channel is laughable, so I have to keep paying.

You know, maybe Sony and Nintendo have... pressure to do the same? Surely they are seeking to charge for online play, they just can't do it right now. It's a lot easier to charge for something when someone's already charged for it.

Why? Nintendo absoloutely rake it in, they prove more profit is to be made in careful HW decisions and good SW choices.

Good! This makes sense. The costs that engineer talked about, though, affect also the free versions of Sony and MS networks independently from whether they offer basic online multiplayer or not. Those costs are unavoidable, for at least two reasons: First, console users expect and pretend a hassle free experience, this extends also to network connection, so all this burden falls on the providers' shoulders, that in consoles are the manufacturers themselves. Second, console manufacturers want to keep total controlon their platforms, including net access, this has a huge cost.

MS model is a way to be sure the network part of the business is profitable too, other models are possible, most probably Sony model, given its big share in movie and multimedia market, allows it to replace the basic online multiplayer revenue it gives up with movies and other "classic" entertainment sales revenue.

I guess my "frugal" concept of online multiplayer can work well without risking to sink companies only on PC, because it's a platform not affected by default by those special and expensive needs of  both console producers and users. Valve model works too, but it's quite different too, as it has a very strong sales revenue. Successful MMOGs are furtherly different (and the annual fees of the pay ones are usually greater than XBL Gold subscription). Crappy MMOGs like FarmVille are able to profit from a small percent (but big as absolute number of users) share that pays for premium features on a huge total user base of which the vast majority plays for free, and strongly limiting costs giving each user a very small world (BTW not connected in real time with other players), relying on Facebook and other social networks, making deals with them and limiting the infrastructure costs making a lot of transactions not real time, but based on social networks messaging system (this way the whole gift sending part of the game requires them to manage some transactions per minute with each user instead of several transactions per second as it happens in real time worlds; and also the real time part about actually working on the virtual fields and farms is very slow, limiting transaction rate too).