PS3 Online: How It Works
The debate about online gaming is over. (Although the debate about
whether one can be "face to face" with a capability will perhaps
linger.) While we've spent the last five years - and longer, in some
cases - talking about whether online functions were actually important
to games, that discussion is now at an end. Online won, although
perhaps not in the way that its most loyal adherents had hoped for.
Every next-gen console, and even every recent handheld console, now
sports an online service out of the box; networks are becoming a core
element of what we could, if we were being a bit pretentious, call "the
gaming ecosystem".
That doesn't, however, mean that all games
have become online games. We haven't dispensed with single-player, and
we never will - for many people, compelling experiences come from
storytelling or cinematics, not from deathmatch or 40-man raiding
parties. It's still hard to tell just how many people actually care
about online gaming in terms of actually playing with other people, but
it's certainly a fairly small, albeit growing, proportion of gamers.
No, the real explosion in online has come from other areas - such as
the ability to get game demos, to access new content for your games, to
communicate with friends, to create an online identity for yourself and
even to download entirely new games or retro titles over the network.
Multiplayer gaming, as distinct from online gaming, is just a small
part of what is now a much larger tapestry.
Read the full text here...Rob Fahey
October 13, 2006
Source: Eurogamer