Talk Playstation 3 News

After yesterday’s Store updates, several people discovered that they could not purchase games or even worse access the Store. On the PlayStation Blog, Patrick Seybold described the incident as “experiencing difficulty accessing the PlayStation Store at this time”. One person on the European PlayStation forum claimed that he was even billed twice for a product.

But due to the hard work of the PSN engineers they managed to solve the problem before the day was over (even though something like this should never happen).

The PlayStation Store wasn’t the only one experiencing problems. Xbox Live had account managment issues.

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Aaron Greenberg, Product manager for Xbox 360 was raving about his own product but coming to the competition it seems compliments are a no no.

We al know Home still needs to be launched as Open Beta, but it has picked up a small delay due to technical difficulties.

Aaron Greenberg was quick to jump to conclusion that the Home concept is out of dated.

What Home to me feels like is Second Life for hardcore gamers, it doesn’t feel like it broadens the experience and invites people in. When they unveiled it, it seemed innovative. I think what’s happened is we are a couple of years later and we feel beyond that. It feels like 2005 tech in 2008. I’m not sure that’s what people want.

We wonder what the NXE is then? We were disappointed to read that he compared Home to Xbox Live like a IGN reviewer compared Football Manager 09 (WWSM 09) to PES09 and Fifa09.

Home and Xbox live are two different things. Live is a service, home is an extention to a service (like the 360’s NXE). Many Microsoft managers were quick to say they have a better deal online as Netflix is picking up sales and their hardware sales were greater then that of the PS3. But does that make you better? We’ll leave the judgement to you.

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So Xbox Live has been better than Playstation Network in terms of features and still is better but with Firmware Version 2.4 on the way things are about to change.

So when firmware 2.4 is released the Playstation Network will be pretty much neck to neck with Xbox Live. Firmware 2.4 will add in-game XMB and a Trophy system (Sony’s answer to XBL achievements) so this firmware will pretty much overtake XBL ever so slightly.

Just think about the $50 a year fee for XBL versus Free for PSN. Not only that but Playstation Network is easily expandable through these firmware updates so they can probably add a lot more feature than XBL.

In terms of connection and online play there is nothing wrong with online play on the PSN, no lag apart from if your playing with someone with a crappy connection.

Whats missing from PSN that will definitely make it better than XBL after firmware 2.4?

• Advance invite system. Although you can invite friends while in game before you start a game but Home features a more advance invite system where it will launch the game and jump straight in automatically.
• PSN’s player based hosting VS Microsofts dedicated servers. This can be rectified if Sony were to put some dedicated servers in for PSN, probably a future plan.
• A new user interface. Ok XBL is far easier to use and navigate but again this can be sorted just like the Playstation Store got sorted.
• XBL has movie and tv show downloads. Ok but Sony is coming out with a video store.
• More content. PSN needs more content and XBL currently has more and gets more every week. Again this can be fixed by game companies releasing more demo’s and Sony acting upon it.

All the above can be sorted out and implemented via future firmware updates, so eventually Playstation Network will overtake Xbox Live and best of all it will still be free of charge.

Can you think of any features that are missing from Playstation Network that will make it better than Xbox Live AFTER firmware 2.4 is released?

[UPDATE] There is a typo in this article. I got mixed up and very sorry for that. Playstation Network has dedicated servers while Xbox Live doesn’t. Just wanted to correct it.

Playstation Network is starting to show a difference and looks and sounds more exciting than Xbox Live Arcade. Issue 12 of the Playstation 3 magazine goes on to say:

“You could argue that it merely shows that Xbox Live Arcade appeals to a different audience to PSN, but that’s missing the point. Sony’s list is the one which will make heartening reading to small independent developers, proving that even those ideas that might seem relatively niche can have huge success at the right price. Seeing the superb Flow in pole position is particularly satisfying…”

In my opinion i think the downloadable content on PSN is far better than what XBLA has to offer.