I recently renewed my Xbox Live gold account, and I was reminded of the first time that I signed up for it just over a year ago. A friend came to visit and brought Battlefield: Bad Company, and convinced me to sign up for a gold account right then and there. It was easy but only because I already had a silver account and wireless adapter. Getting to that initial point required more effort and money than it was worth. In that short span of a year, online connectivity has become a major selling point for games and consoles. Nearly every new triple-A game has some form of online play, either competitive or cooperative, and even some multiplayer-only games have jumped from the PC to the consoles. The consoles themselves embrace the online world with a mix of downloadable games and community features. Yet, for all of this hype and support, there are many unnecessary hurdles a customer has to face before getting connected. Hurdles that can easily scare someone away, and that have consistently gone untended. Despite their apparent interest in the online space, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are shooting themselves in the foot.
Microsoft, arguably, has the most invested in its online offerings. There are many aspects of Live that make it an actual community and not just a mish-mash of anonymous people playing the same game. The party system and standard headset encourage communication among players, and the avatars give people a unique visual identity in addition to their chosen gamertag. Members can watch movies from Netflix, with more from Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm coming in the fall. The “Summer of Arcade,” a five week period which highlights certain Xbox Live Arcade games, has become a yearly promotion, and 1 vs. 100 has emerged as a popular community game that appeals to gamers of every ilk. Yet entering this online world is costly. The hard drive, a necessity when it comes to downloadable games and content games, is prohibitively expensive, as is Microsoft’s official wireless adapter. Even then you only get a silver account, to get a gold account and actually play online with others you have to pay a yearly fee. There’s a workaround for people who don’t want to pay for the adapter, but with all the focus placed on Live and its features, people shouldn’t have to want a workaround.
Sony has invested just as much, if not more, with a couple ambitious projects. There’s Home, Sony’s attempt at social networking through games, and in what is perhaps the biggest thrust towards online gaming, the PSP Go will only play downloaded games. It’s easier to get online with the PlaySation 3 since the console comes with a hard drive and wi-fi built in, and the PlayStation Network has a good selection of games, movies, and re-releases of original PlayStation games. Sony even has its version of the “Summer of Arcade” titled “Spring Fever.” While Sony is risking a lot with its online features, support for these features is rare (with the exception of the PSP Go since it’s not out yet). Many gamers have forgotten about Home since there are never any major promotions or events to encourage people to visit. Original PlayStations games are rarely released, so Sony has failed to capitalize on gamer nostalgia in that regard. There’s no standard headset, making many multiplayer games oddly quiet. And the 20GB model (which, it should be noted, has since been discontinued) has no built-in wi-fi, so anyone unfortunate enough to buy that model has to figure out for themselves how to get online. Not an insurmountable problem, but one that shouldn’t exist considering how much Sony has invested online.
Nintendo is seen as having the least to offer online, and this holds true when compared to Microsoft and Sony. The biggest draw of the other consoles is their competitive multiplayer, something lacking on the Wii since most of Nintendo’s focus has gone into the Wii’s online stores: There’s WiiWare for small games made exclusively for the console, the Virtual Console for re-releases of older games, and DSiWare for games or applications made for the portable. The Wii also has built-in wi-fi, so getting connected is incredibly easy. There’s no standard headset, but since there are very few games that even offer online multiplayer, this isn’t as big of a problem as it is for the PlayStation 3. Yet even though Nintendo has a much narrower focus towards its online features, it still has its fair share of unreasonable issues. The Wii doesn’t store credit card or billing info, so you have to input that information every time you want to buy something, a repetitive task nearly unheard of in this age of online shopping. There are no demos, a fact made worse when you take into account the number of sub-par games released to the service. Friend Codes are a twelve digit code that identify you console, but they’re different for every game that uses Nintendo’s Wi-Fi Connection, so if you play multiple games online you have to keep a record of multiple Friend Codes. In addition, Nintendo doesn’t promote its online service at all. Microsoft has its “Summer of Arcade,” Sony has its Spring Fever,” but no downloadable game for WiiWare receives any promotion by Nintendo. It’s as if the service doesn’t exist.
As more focus is put into online features, it should be made easier to get online and access those features. But while each company has a lot to offer, they seem unwilling to support those offerings beyond simple marketing, and Nintendo doesn’t even that. I’m sure there are many people who have a 360 that uses the blades system. They’re the kind of people who only use their console one in a while, and have no desire to pay for all the peripherals needed to connect online, or compete with others not on the couch next to them. Convincing these people to get online will be difficult, if not impossible, if these hurdles remain.