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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 2262614" data-attributes="member: 151">I'm not sure I'd agree with that.  The PS/2, which has a very half-hearted online presence, has good online numbers.  Look at Final Fantasy XI: it currently has over 500,000 subscribers.  Xbox-Live has over 1.5 million subscribers, at least.  Nintendo was constantly criticized for it's lack of an online presence.  When Socom II came out for the PS/2, within 48 hours there were 22,000 people playing online.  I'm sure there are plenty of folks who don't care about online options, at all.  But I think many gamers like to have the option...giving Xbox-Silver out for free is good candy.  More and more games of the current generation support some form of online play...I think MS and Nintendo are correctly reading the potential for the service better than Sony currently is.  Sony traditionally fears or dislikes any system they can't control, and that's the very definition of the 'net.As for Microsoft's backwards-compatability, all we know so far is this:Two weeks ago, <a href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/224103_xboxback13.html" target="_blank">Microsoft wasn't sure</a> that the X-box would be backwards compatible.Last week, <a href="http://xbox360.joystiq.com/entry/1234000913043569/" target="_blank">J. Allard said it sure would be</a>, at least for some of them.This week, at E3, the story has broken that games will most likely need to be <a href="http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=8996" target="_blank">recompiled to run on the Xbox-360</a>.  They are being very vague about it...but I'm assuming some sort of compiler will run on the 360 itself...because if they think I'm buying another copy of an existing game to play on my current Xbox...they've got another think coming.  Right now, it sounds like MS is working really, really hard to get some sort of emulator compatability working, but they don't know if they'll have it ready in time for launch, and are afraid to say so.  This is the disadvantage of their rush to be first.  No one doubts for a minute that the PS/3 will be backwards compatible, nor the Nintendo for that matter.I think the Xbox-360 will support some games out of the gate (especially the biggest names) and then they'll release updates periodically to fix more games as they go, leveraging Xbox-Live as well.</blockquote>

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