For those of you who get a sick thrill out of criticizing and whining about the PlayStation 3’s online functionality, save your breath. As CVG reports, Sony Computer Entertainment’s president of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, recently told Edge Magazine that Sony is fully aware of the missteps it took when developing the PS3's online integration.
“I think we were late to offer the platform-level support, to make the online functionality work at that level…We made the prior decision that you do not introduce the common centralized network names into every experience, so publishers made their own. That was fine at the start, but as more and more games have online functionality you need a unified approach.”
Yoshida then concedes, "So Microsoft took that approach in the last generation, and maybe that's where people see the difference when they compare Xbox Live and PSN."
Considering Sony wasn’t going to beat Microsoft to market with the PS3 anyway, it seems a bit peculiar that it would forgo making sure the PSN integration was fully featured in favor of just getting the console out the door, especially given Microsoft’s success with online support with the original Xbox. Then again, it does seem that you do get what you pay for, and PlayStation users pay nothing, so I guess it’s also not terribly surprising how much catching up Sony has had to do this generation. (And continues to do, since the recent firmware 3.0 update still didn’t introduce features that PS3 owners have been requesting for a while now.)
Does the PlayStation Network provide you with all the functionality that you want/need? Do you agree with Sony's strategy to put off full fleshing out PSN until several years into the PS3's life cycle?
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