Sony has an inexorable advance in its "free multiplayer" offering, a maneuver that can't help but gain ground in the long term. If you want to know why Electronic Arts has apparently sworn them a life debt, this is it: at three hundred dollars, the value comparison (both annually and at time of purchase) is bullet-proof. Playstation Plus, by comparison, is less coherent. It's "premium" in the classic sense, that is to say, a luxury - the basic service may be elemental, but it's complete. Plus is about paying for things you may or may not want. You pay for access to "free games" you dont own, or you're renting them I guess, and then if you stop paying your game turns back into a pumpkin.

(This isn't to say that it won't work, necessarily: it just doesn't work on me. I can recall coming home from junior high one day, opening the refrigerator to drink milk in a wholly unauthorized fashion, and finding that a shelf and a half of the device had been turned over to phalanx upon phalanx of Yoplait Strawberry Yogurt.

I asked my father why he had done this, and he cocked his head as though I'd just vomited up a gallon of alien phonemes. To him, it was the most obvious thing in the universe. He had purchased the yogurt because the yogurt was on sale.)