It's a fact. PSN got hacked April Last year, 09'...It's a big target that get's hit in the Bulls-eye every time.

aybe you should start with why 360 is so terrible?
With Xbox Live Microsoft made digital distribution model that is now copied also they gave users new services and brought true online gaming to consoles. i may not like it and almos never use it but I have to admit they have made online mass thing for consoles.

Are you seriously asking? I suppose I'll bite...

It literally invented online multiplayer for consoles, which is one of the biggest shifts in modern gaming. Look how many games are online or multiplayer focuses on consoles now. That's 100% because of Xbox Live. Like I said, you don't have to like it (I certainly don't) but the influence and innovation was massive.

Less massive but still influential is achievements, which everyone seems to forget were invented by Microsoft as well. Now they're in nearly every game and every platform.

To me as a PC gamer, Win9x (mainly Win95 and 98SE) were probably the greatest achievement of Microsoft ever.

Maybe some people were disappointed that they were not based on WinNT, but they were a great product keeping MS-DOS (gaming) compatibility, and offering a new platform for believable Windows gaming (Win3.1 games were pretty much a joke). Many DOS games were actually easier to get working from Win9x, than booted on a real MS-DOS mode. And even for the most problematic games, Win9x offered a possibility to boot completely to MS-DOS.

XP (and 2000) was pretty good too, finally moving Windows gaming to "NT-core" and better filesystem, when the time was finally ripe for such a drastic move.

Win7 is some evolution, and for now I am somewhat sceptical about Win8.

Fine. I was waiting for that.

The Dreamcast did online, but it was in a period where they didn't have the infrastructure and technology to support it. PSO did well, but the other games just could not be supported well by a 56k connection. Plus it drove the costs up like crazy and probably doomed the Dreamcast from the start.

Xbox Live introduced the central network to ensure stability, and also brought in the ability to patch, update and get more content. Dreamcast may have a prototype first, but it was Xbox Live that caught on.

Unfortunately you are wrong on both points

Online multiplayer on consoles was invented by SEGA with the Dreamcast

"Achievements" were present in many games on the disk itself long before MS "Made them popular"
yeah, the fact that PSN got hacked once is the scapegoat that everyone uses

Meanwhile...when XBL goes down (and it has happened many times) no one says a word

My point was: you still haven't answered my question

I've got Xubuntu and Lubuntu installed in two VMs on this MacBook, in addition to one of Hexxeh's Chromium OS builds, and I'm working on changing the partitioning of my hard disk to dual boot 10.6 and Precise Pangolin. :)

Nethack, who records all your feats in a exploration?

But seriously, there is quite a lot of games with achievements, in a form or another. Nearly all game with unlockable items works that way: if, in any gaming session, you achieve a specific feat, it's recorded and you unlock something. Think Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, Tekken, think SoulEdge...

The only really new things are trivial achievements (Started the game! Created a character! Started the first level! Performed a jump!), and standardization.

Ok, but you have to admit the idea of connecting all these achievements to a single profile is something that nobody had done before.

+1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

That was just taking KGB profiles and removing the KGB. :p

Microsoft is probably the first constructor / publisher to link game feats to user accounts for all games. It's were it stops being a invention but rather starts being a refinement (still good if you like achievement):

- I had already a number of achievements linked to me: the Hi-Score table of arcade games was the off-line version. Of course, the profile is limited (just the same three letters), but in a arcade room, when someone is trying to beat your score, you can say: "Yep, 'ZOZ' is me. Good luck, kid."

- A number of games allowed players to publish their scores, timing, etc. on-line, on the editor website.

- There was competitions based on achieving a particular feat, recording it (via a camera), and winners got listed and got prices. Magazines, forums, had sections dedicated to that - like the Nintendo owned magazine.

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I'm not really receptive toward MS game network: my last tries to make a X-Box Live account resulted in an unexplained numbered error, and my last experience with the PC version of Live (for Fallout 3+) was awful - not to say Sony or Nintendo are any better: I hate the slowness of the Sony network (and this thing pushes mandatory updates to play any game), and the Wii store interface is unresponsive, to be polite.

You see, no one says a word about XBL crashes because they have all these games. The Average XBOXer buy an average of six games per purchase. Also PSN has gotten hacked more than once. XBL doesn't go down that much anymore. PSN gets hype cause now the PSN has more users that play a LOT online.

How is it terrible, care to elaborate? Also, i have to remind you that the Xbox 360 is the most profitable gaming platform of this generation. I mean, its the one that sells the most games, which is why most publishers and developers focus on it. If it was that bad, i dont think it would be doing so well. And Kinect is just printing money for Microsoft.

They did make a few mistakes, like fucking Rare up, letting Bungie and Bizarre Creations go, closing talented internal studios (like Ensemble), but still they got a lot of things right.