PlayStation Network First Impressions

By: Jared Black

With Sony’s launch of the PS3 today, the company enters the next generation console war with a machine that is, unlike the original PSone and PS2, the most powerful machine on the block. Hardware is only part of the puzzle however; the battle will also be fought with the services each manufacturer offers. Central to this battle is each company’s online service. Microsoft has a commanding five year head start with Xbox Live, which has grown into a full-fledged online service offering online play, dozens of free demos, trailers, gamer pictures, and an excellent arcade full of original games and retro classics. While Xbox Live has turned into a huge revenue stream for Microsoft and other publishers, Sony’s network largely floundered in the previous generation on both PS2 and PSP, with dozens of online titles but no central network. This left it up to individual publishers to develop their own proprietary services, and forced gamers to sign up separately for any of them they wished to use.

Now a new generation is here, and both Sony and Nintendo are jumping headfirst into the full-fledged online network arena in a frenzied attempt to play catch up to Microsoft’s dominating head start. Sony’s PlayStation Network is the first to arrive, and it’s clear that there’s still work to be done (particularly with the online store) before Sony can really compete.

First, the good news. In my tests so far online play has been very smooth, with little to no lag and Live Aware type functionality that’s particularly impressive in Ridge Racer 7. Browsing the web is much more intuitive than it is on the PSP, thanks to the larger screen and a few interface changes. Many formats are unfortunately not supported (including wmv, which publishers have used for most of the movies found on our site) and the browser has a few quirks in other areas (it warps our JavaScript menus a bit as well), but by and large it does a great job of delivering a basic browsing experience. Although I haven’t had a chance to try out some of the rest of the features, it’s also great to see other functionality such as built-in friends lists and online chat. Most importantly, it’s all still totally free (including online play) aside from the downloadable games and premium content that will be released in the future.

The bad news is that Sony’s online network is still clearly in its infancy. The most obvious place this is apparent is in the PS Store. Only six demos are available at the time of this writing, four for retail games (MotorStorm, Formula One, Resistance: Fall of Man, and NBA ’07) and two for online only titles Blast Factor and Cash Guns Chaos DLX. The rest of the store is filled out with a smattering of other content, basically boiling down to trailers for Blu-Ray movies and games. Now I realize that this is in large part due to the fact that the network’s simply new (although I have no doubt they could’ve worked out some deals to have more content at launch), and will be rectified as more games are released and Sony’s able to fill out the network with newer content. But the fact still remains that at present it pales in comparison to what’s offered on Xbox Live, which is getting ready to expand yet again on November 22^nd to include a variety of downloadable TV and movie programming.

The other short-term problem that I must mention, even though it probably won’t be much of an issue in a few days, is that right now things are extremely slow. Although online play for me has been hitch-free as I mentioned (and that’s obviously the most important part of any online network), downloads from the PlayStation Store take much longer to finish than they do on Xbox Live. Downloading four demos from the PS Store takes far longer than it does to download similarly sized ones on Xbox Live. I was also disconnected while signing up for the service around 10am EST this morning, which was incredibly frustrating since the setup doesn’t save any of the information you manually entered (and I didn’t have an USB keyboard handy to retype it all). Naturally most PS3 launch owners are busy catching up on downloading the content already available so heavy traffic is to be expected, but given the low number of consoles at launch it’s clear that Sony’s network is nowhere near as beefy as Microsoft’s at this stage.

Other issues I have with the service largely revolve around poor design decisions in the store that will hopefully be resolved as it evolves. The most obvious problem is that there’s no download queue, so your PS3 is essentially locked as long as you’re downloading something. As you can see from the grainy picture to the right, this has resulted in me having to spend a lot of time waiting around today while things download. This was an early problem with the Xbox 360’s service, but was eventually fixed with last spring’s update. Right now it’s especially agonizing given the slow response times from Sony’s network. No doubt Sony will issue a similar update in the near future to add an active downloads queue, but the company really should’ve learned from Microsoft’s mistake and had it in place from day one.

Also, the thumbnails used to list each piece of content are spaced too far apart on the screen, and basically dumped into one of a few basic categories. While not a big problem now, if this setup remains as the store grows it may soon be difficult to find specific content without a lot of hunting. Even though the cursor does jump from hot spot to hot spot over each piece of content, it’s still not as user-friendly as Xbox Live’s grouping of content into several drilldown categories. Finally, the store is simply a standalone function of Sony’s online network at this point, and so far is not really tied into actual games in any way. This will no doubt change as downloadable content for specific games becomes available and Sony leverages the store better, but for now it feels very isolated from the overall online experience, particularly when compared to Xbox Live.

Overall the PlayStation Network is a solid start to Sony’s online strategy, but it’s painfully obvious that it’s still in its infancy and that Sony wasn’t really ready for the type of traffic it’s already receiving. Hopefully they’ll issue an update soon that corrects the problems I mentioned, in particular streamlining and integrating the PS Store with the rest of the network.

Posted: 11/17/2006