XBOX Live is very good, but its not that much better than PSN, its certainly not worth paying for, in my experience, anytime more than 2m people are online it crashes. I still use it and begrudgingly pay for it, but i think ms should make Live free, especially when the PSN update and home hit, as it is Live has the slight advantage in features, but by the end of 2008 the monthly fee will look like an insult compared to what the PSN will do for free.

 Yeah, this is what I find strange when people start to argue that Xbox Live's internet is so much better, it doesn't have dedicated servers all games are hosted on another person's 360.  I've always questioned why I'm paying for a service that doesn't even have dedicated servers.

@ RDBRaptor

i know. when i had my 360, every single fucking time i tried to host a match, people would leave cause the connection would be so shit.

.....But how many demos, trailers and such does PSN have? Last I checked (and correct me if I'm wrong), but 100% of games don't have demos, do they? Nearly every single retail release has a demo, and 100% of Arcade games do. Whereas only 50% (if I remember right) of PSN Game titles have demos.

And the same goes for trailers...Any time I checked a masterlist of PSN Trailers, and Content, it seemed, for the most part, to lag well behind what Live was offering. Not that it isn't there, but it seems like a case of "get what you pay for".

mrstickball

can you give the ps store a chance? seriosuly its only been out for about a year now..

Whats really good about LIVE is that it's easy to navigate easy to communicate nothing fancy about it

I have ... and PSN is rather clumsy.

My case and point - I was reviewing a game on PSN and it took me at least 30-40 minutes to download it - and that's with detailed instructions from Sony PR folks. I was invited to a LIVE beta - one was a COD4 private beta and another was an MS one - and I was e-mailed a code - entered it and downloaded it quickly.

LIVE is worth every penny. Free is one thing, but you know, so what I pay like $3 a month vs. having a very, very clumsy PSN. And to the folks who said LIVE isn't as good as PSN - I ask you this - have you been on LIVE since the Xbox days? The 360 version of LIVE is much, much better these days.

I have given the PSN network a chance. Even the Wii store is much, much easier to navigate than PSN. 

ROTFLMBO! If you're paying $70 a year for LIVE, in my crib, I would have 2 years. You're getting ripped, bud.

Is XBox Live Gold worth a purchase? No, not in my opinion. Unless they start actually hosting multiplayer matches, it will never be worth paying for. Of course, I do come from PC gaming, where other people pay for the servers. I just play on them .

Is XBox Live Gold better than PSN? Yes. The store redesign should make navigating the PSN Store easier, but on the multiplayer side of things, the PSN is lacking. No in-game XMB from day 1 was a huge mistake. Things should be getting better through firmware updates, but currently, the PSN implementation into games is a joke. I appreciate that they give developers some freedom in how it's implemented, but this is one aspect I feel should have been standardized.

I WAS a journalist until the newspaper I was working for closed (abqtrib.com is the site). I am doing PR now but still have tons of contacts in the biz. I still gets games sometimes. I landed some sweet games (Rockband with a free guitar, GHIII, Halo 3 the weekend before it was released - Mass Effect a week before release - Bioshock a week before release) but honestly, after reviewing games, I didn't have fun with them. As a journalist, I could contact PR firms and devs and publishers directly and request a grip of stuff. I e-mailed the contacts for this PSN game about parachuting. It's a cool game. Two contacts hit me up and sent me the code. With COD4, I contacted Activision directly and they let me in on the private beta. Oh, it was sweet.

With Atari, I was invited to the PS2 TDU beta test and was digitally recreated as an NPC in the game. Club D - I am the president. 

I miss that, but hay, I have tons of reviews, clips and newspaper pages on my wall. I have no regrets.

It was one heck of a ride. I may go back into it soon if I get sick of Public Relations.