with GH3 I think quite a bit of that is royalties, but $3 is STEEP.

How does Sony milk consumers?  Microsoft is the one forcing Epic to charge for their Gears of War content and charging way too much for most of their items.  Nintendo charges more than they should for VC games as well.  Again, how is Sony milking?

Nintendo needs to focus on online to begin with. 

A lot of people like online games.  You really do act like you work for Nintendo. 

Xbox Live is so far ahead that this topic isn't really worth discussing.  Maybe in a few years the others can catch up but I have my doubts since it's a moving target and as soon as they catch up to where Xbox Live was it will have been made better.

You're saying a free Home and everything that entails is not good enough?

You're getting dedicated servers for free, Live doesn't have that generally... how is this not Sony doing better than MS in that regard? 

Live will be free sometime in the next two years I predict. 

And a lot of people like a flashed out single player experience.

Gballzack is correct, a lot more games are starting to leave the Single player experience on the side and just release games with strong multiplayer. Of course, this is not true in all cases (Olivion), but I would love more games to improve their single player experience and have the multiplayer as an addition.

Wii games seem to be going this route, but most likely that's not through choice but because Nintendo's online system is so crappy. I'm all for single player and local multiplayer, that's the entire reason I bought a console rather than just upgraded my PC.

I think you're both completely wrong.  Just because there are more online games on consoles does not mean there are fewer single player games.  Most of the best games still have great single player experiences.  Now, there are also online-only games but it's not like you have to play those.  

Every game I've rented so far for the PS3 has had a long single player experience, including the ones with great online elements.  Just because some people are saying the multi-player is more fun does not mean the single player experience is not complete.  If you don't like Halo's and Gears of War's single player, don't play those games.  Play Resistance, heh... 

Online games is a much better trend than sloppy ports and crappy mini-games.  But I guess all 3 are part of the great variety console games are getting.

I'd also like to point out that patches are generally for the multi-player experience, like Motorstorm's "fix" of the boosting.  There's nothing wrong with patches because if the shipped game is terrible and has to be patched it will be punished by reviews of games because they review shipped copies. 

In summary:  stop whining, online games are great. 

I hope you are right.  The barriers preventing me from owning a 360 are:  hardware failures way too high, a lot of console exclusives also on the PC which would be more useful for me to upgrade, and charging for free online features that battle.net and others have had for more than a decade. 

I think PS3's online service is already better than Live's, just because of the dedicated servers not having a host bias...oh, and not having lag.  XMB access while in-game is coming soon, and that is about the last feature that I care about.  Home will be icing.

For people who complain about GH songs being expensive...it's not just an mp3 you're downloading or whatever. Plenty of work goes into each song that gets re-recorded and programmed...I can definitely understand them being 2 or 3 dollars...a standard mp3 that you can only listen to costs $1 usually, so I don't see the big deal.

I believe they make you buy them in packs of 3 at a time, soif you just want 1 song you have to buy 2 others as well.  The price per song is higher than when you buy the game, too...