{"id":49,"date":"2008-05-09T14:46:54","date_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/games-and-identity\/"},"modified":"2008-05-09T14:46:54","modified_gmt":"2008-05-09T14:46:54","slug":"games-and-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/05\/09\/games-and-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Games and Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The arrival of the new Grand Theft Auto game has left with a bit of a dilemma… I have an xbox 360 which I’m pretty happy with.  A bunch of my workmates have PS3’s.  We’ve been talking quite a bit about GTA and they’ve been telling me how good it is, and how it’s got online play that I should join in with.  <\/p>\n

So do I buy it for my xbox and play without my mates, or buy a PS3 and play online with them.  <\/p>\n

I don’t like having problems like this… I rarely need much of a reason to blow cash on sexy technology so having an argument to do just that doesn’t help my bank balance.  It strikes me that the reason I have this dilemma is that there’s no unified identity or play across PS3 and xbox.  <\/p>\n

Xbox Live is now pretty well developed, but the impression I get from my mates is that the Playstation Network is less so.  Without knowing the in’s and out’s of games development I would imagine that sorting out the online play is quite complex and that its something you’d want to do as fewer times as possible.  <\/p>\n

Given that end users probably want cross-platform play, and that developers would probably quite like to have one way of doing things, if I was Microsoft I’d be looking at providing some sort of Xbox Live dev kit for PS3’s.<\/p>\n

I’m guessing there are some pretty well defined API’s there that aren’t necessarily tied to a hardware platform.  And it’s not necessarily something Sony could stop (unless the PS3 developers are contractually tied to the PSN), so I imagine its technically possible.<\/p>\n

I can see why MS wouldn’t want to do this, after all it might be one less reason by an XBox over a PS3.  But given that the PS3 seems to be gaining momentum now that Blueray has won over HD-DVD it might be nice way of MS cashing in on Sony’s success.   If PS3 users are able to play on XBox Live it would seem like quite a good way of driving new subscriptions and giving the PS3 owners a taste of what’s available on the full Live Marketplace on xbox.<\/p>\n

Does that make sense or am I just daydreaming?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The arrival of the new Grand Theft Auto game has left with a bit of a dilemma… I have an xbox 360 which I’m pretty happy with.  A bunch of my workmates have PS3’s.  We’ve been talking quite a bit about GTA and they’ve been telling me how good it is, and how it’s got … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Games and Identity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[13,104,36,103],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home","category-tech","tag-microsoft","tag-playstation","tag-xbox","tag-xbox-live","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}