Take the money! Open the (X-)Box!

[kingandy]

I am totally thinking about selling up my XBox and jumping ship to the PS3 boat, partly for the Blue Ray but mostly because Microsoft refuse to even consider the notion of a free BBC iPlayer.

It's not so much that I am desperate for a BBC player (I can get it on my computer and even on my iPod touch), though it would be nice to get it on the TV. No, it's more the way that allowing their users to get any sort of functionality out of their console without turning it into a revenue stream is just so completely outside their business model. It gives you some real insight into how they think of their customers.

Fair enough for in-game DCL, I guess, but when you realise they want you pay to download game-based themes - which is, essentially, the privilege of plastering advertising all over the brief interstitial screen between turning your console on and actually doing whatever it is you want to do with it - it's just sad.

Comments

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

You know I believe I may have mentioned the revenue stream tendency on numerous occasions, but did you listen? Decorum prevents me from saying I told you so :-P

For balance I should point out Fliss was unable to play Dragon Age: Origins due to an outage on PSN. I don't think this was due to some evil second hand preventing DRM (like Mass Effect 2 for the PC) but because games get confused if they can't upload trophies to PSN. Hopefully this is just a silly glitch...

I still think the PS3 offers the best overall experience and I'm pretty happy there is still some margin before the console is fully exploited. Join us, the PS3 slim is well under £300 now. You'll be among friends ;-)

[kingandy]

The "pay for desktops and buddy icons advertising our products" thing was faintly amusing. The "You can post to Facebook and Twitter! ... but only with Gold membership!" was just sad (it's not something I'd particularly want to do through my XBox).

The funniest thing is the Sky partnership^[1] - you can watch Sky TV on your XBox if you have a Sky account, but unless you're paying for Gold membership as well you only get some kind of basic level of access. So clearly there's some kind of Sky remuneration going on, but not enough to cover the whole service. That or they just can't resist the chance to add revenue.

It's like they don't understand that if you add value while increasing the cost, you're not really adding value at all.

[1] Which I totally see is another reason they wouldn't want to offer BBC content for free

[kingandy]

Incidentally: "A mass story-telling session on internet gaming forum NeoGAF points towards the issue potentially being related to a calendar bug in older PlayStation 3 consoles, not the PlayStation Network as was first suspected."

The first clue was that it is a problem "even for some consoles that aren't connected to the PSN, like debug units."

Whups.

http://kotaku.com/5482328/ps3s-suffering-from-global-network-lockdown

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Get a Wii fit. If nothing else, you can pretend it'll make you fit.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we noticed the date was incorrect (it's set to update via internet). I wonder if there is a date bug between Y2K and Y2038?

[doctor-kaos.livejournal.com]

And get depressed when it changes your Wii to your "body shape"

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Never underestimate the joy of watching a lover shift their cute ass via the Wii fit.

[kingandy]

It seems likely to me that it's a February 29th thing (even though this year doesn't have a leap in it, it's still possible Sony's calendar is confused on the matter).

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

That would make sense. I guess it will fix itself tomorrow then?

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

Yay, PS3! Little Big Planet is the most awesomest game in the world ever and is the only reason you should get a PS3 (never mind this bluray rubbish).