Does online matter to consoles? Yes it does, and I should have stated this more clearly in my original post. Is the feature currently over hyped. I think so.

You forget the masses that have bought a console just because of online play. The main reason I bought the XBOX 360 was because of what it offered with XBOX LIVE. No other console has a comparable online experience. A better title for your post could have been “when will the masses catch on to online play?”. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of factors that your missing as to why the numbers are so low as of right now. For example, broadband availability. How many households of console owners actually have web access? That would have been a great number to feature in your article. Although, you probably would have made that number up too. Then someone would catch you on it and then we would see an update to this post. Just some food for thought. Good luck on your next post.

Blake, its great that you are interested in the gaming space and its great you express this interest via you blog posting. But, talk to guys like Jim Greer or other figures in the space who have a finger on the pulse. They have a wealth of knowledge about what really goes on ‘inside the walls’.

To add more evidence of a connected community, look no further then Guitar Hero II on the Xbox 360 system. By reviewing a leaderboard on Live, you will see over 750,000 users in that environment. Each one of those users was “connected” as part of the online game play. Sure, they did not connect with another gamer in the truest definition of ‘online gaming’ but they still benefited from it. And I might add that GH2 launched a mere 5-5.5 months ago.

Those are some pretty amazing numbers you might want to add your notes.

Srs Bznis

I’m also enjoying the games that I’ve downloaded through the Wii’s Virtual Console, including Super Metroid.

Sega clearly bet too early on downloadable content, since it was still too much the modem era when they tried it with the Dreamcast.

http://www.xbox360achievements.org/achievements.php?gameID=271

It’s a new technology that relies on always-on broadband. The adaption rate is slow. It doesn’t help that some residential broadband operators are actually blocking some of the functionality …. (like Toredo IPv6 over UDP over IPv4 tunneling for the Wii….

-Victor

Eric, about 33% of the games I play are online and rising. I’m not convinced, however, that makes online play a vital part to games. Also, you’re right about the Bioshock themes, gamerscore, and demo downloads, but I wouldn’t call that online or vital to the BioShock experience.

Also, Bioshock does have online features. For instance, you must be online to add points to your gamerscore, download Bioshock themes, gamerpics, etc. The only way to get the Bioshock demo was to download it from XBOX Live.

There’s an online marketplace for all games. Sure you can get by without being connected, but you aren’t getting the full experience.

Seems to me that your analysis is pretty superficial.

that’s why you’re a journalist and we are entrepreneurs.

we see stuff happening before you do, you just report news of the past.

that’s okay if that’s what you want to do and you get paid for it, good for you !

what makes it intolerable is the degree of know-it-all bigotry you excercise.

The real point of the post merely challenges the prevailing wisdom that online is the end all be all of gaming. Does anyone have data showing that online is more than just a value-add to the much larger (and profitable) goal of interactive entertainment?

Not trying to knock online play at all, just tempering the hype.

You’re right, Lance, I added a fix for Blake; thanks for the catch. (Hopefully I got the % math right.) Hopefully he’ll come in soon to discuss his other points.

uh, no.