If there was one way in which that the original XBox totally dominated the otherwise indomitable PS2, it was XBox Live!. My own personal experiences with Live! have been documented herein, with a fair summary being “it rocks”. It has been a basic assumption on my part that Sony would take a katana to Live! with some sort of coherent online gaming, matchmaking, and marketplace system matched to the PS3. Recent news seemed to be pointing in a different direction.

Then we hear from sources that Sony is planning to use xFire to provide matchmaking, messaging, and game browsing. Excellent. But no: Sony actually comes out and says “yeah, nah… that’s just for one game actually”. WTF? What sort of monkeys are running that place? If it were me I’d just come out and say “Yeah sure that’s us. xFire. Yup. Big-ups to the online gaming community. Word.”, and then run to the accounts department to organise a big fat licensing payout to xFire.

I guess my assumption has to change. I try to be unbiased. Honestly. But from here on out I’m just going to assume that any positive announcement from Sony is actually an incorrect rumour. Kinda like an anti-proton to an Apple fanboy (who take the most nebulous rumours and spin them into fantastically endowed future Apple products).

Update 1: And it continues. This time Neversoft, creators of the hugely popular Tony Hawk series of games for PS2, have decided to drop online play from the upcoming Tony Hawk’s Project 8 PS3 release title:

Neversoft is confident the PS3 version of the game will ship at launch in November, but it still hasn’t received all of the software libraries and has no indication of how the online components will work on PS3, so it’s not offering them.

So not only are they not building in online play, Sony themselves have no idea how the hell they are going to implement it. Nice one.

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