£40 a year is pretty cheap – about, oh, 3 quid a month. And I hadn’t even thought about it being a barrier to all and sundry, such as those types you mentioned Laura.

Bill Gates has just stepped down from running MS to focus on charity stuff apparently.

Ah yes, good old Undertow, wasn’t too impressed with that I have to say. I actually thought my 360 had knackered itself when it wouldn’t connect and the red ring of death was on it’s way – terrifying!

I’m not saying Live doesn’t have its problems, because it certainly does, and the way they handled the problems at christmas was appalling (hey everyone! have a free copy of the XBLA game nobody wants!) but it still seems more cohesive to me and, overall, worth the money.

The new PS3 update notes say that cross-game invites are not going to be a universal feature but will require developers to build the functionality in. I don’t know how much of that is down to not having a centralised system like Live but I’m sure it’s related. Centralising just allows you to do more, or at least to do certain things much more easily, and (of course) getting money for the system does too.

Yeah apologies for the ‘we’ve all been thinking it’ remark, I didn’t realise how that read back until after you mentioned it, delete that if you like dude.

I’ve heard a lot of bad chat about the way the PS3 server issue is handled. But I feel Xbox Live has been extremely shaky as of late, often my dashboard wont load up properly as a result and I have to play offline.

Whether this is a local connection issue or something similar to the server strains over Christmas I’m not sure, but it’s causing a few headaches.

£40 a month for Live? You need to shop elsewhere for your game time cards.

I don’t think Live should automatically be free. I don’t think that games should be more expensive in order to keep the service running, because that’s unfair on people who don’t use the service. And those servers must be paid for, one way or another, or they’ll be shut down. So please, no more of this “we’ve all been thinking it” stuff. I’m sure you were thinking it, but don’t presume to speak for everyone else.

I’m sure the PSN will get better as time goes on, and it may be that MS will need to rethink the cost of Live subscriptions in due course. I don’t think the cost of Live is excessive for what it gives you, though. Just like I don’t object to paying for broadband, rather than thinking it should have come free with my computer.

I dunno if you saw it but Games Radar did a pretty good piece on weighing up the perks of each console’s online service and compared them to Xbox Live. For our £40 a month we’re getting little in the way of exclusive content :/