What Sony can do to make me buy a PS3, eh? Well, they could give me a job so I could pay for it. That'd be a start.
Other than that, I do think the PS3 is a nice deal that will only get better with time. If and when BluRay becomes something I'm interested in (more or less at the same time I buy myself an HDTV), the PS3 will have become a bargain. But the one thing Sony needs to improve and market better, I agree with the GS staff, is their free multiplayer.
Let's be honest here for a minute, I'm not going to pay a single cent to MS to play online over Live Gold. I'll be caught dead before I pay a fee to play Need for Speed or FEAR online when it's free on the PC. Gear of War? Yeah, it's nice, but it's already 60€, I'm not going to add more money ont top of that for the online portion. Maybe if MS gave me back my fee in Live Arcade stuff I'd think about it, but turns out I have to pay for that on the side. I'm a pay once play forever kinda guy. I don't like microtransactions and I don't like monthly fees. Much less monthly fees to unlock features in games. I'm not the only one, either. By MS's own accounts, 40% of 360 are online but just below 20% pay for Gold. That means 80% of 360 owners don't want to pay to play online or don't want play online at all.
Now, Sony gives me that for free. That's good. But nobody's mentionng it. Sony should be there yelling "You know? By the fourth year you own a 360 you'll have paid them the price difference in monthly fees, so save up a bit, buy a PS3 and stop wasting your money every month". But they're not. They just come out and babble about Home and how rumble is last gen "cause I say so". Of course, their online service isn't nearly as good as MS's at this point. If they fix that AND keep it free, that'd be a major selling point in the US (not so much in Europe and Japan, I think). Maybe they should learn from Nintendo, not Microsoft. Nintendo kept their systems easy on the DS, and it seems the Wii one will be identical. Basically, they stopped trying to manage huge user databases and matchmaking. They gave players a big red button with the word "Online" on it. You hit it, you're playing online. No lobby, no nothing. Of course, the prize to pay was friend codes to play with specific rivals, but that annoying, unreasonable detail aside, that model works for me. Instead, Sony seems to have tried to do everything MS is doing without knowing exactly how. They'll probably get there, eventually, but the time it'll take will probably work in MS's favor.
