I remember playing on ps3, where you couldn't chat private with a friend and play together in game, you had to use Skype on a phone.
That isn't exactly true, at-least not the way you are stating it. I mean, OS wise, sure, but you could play together and chat in games. You couldn't chat while playing different games.
I remember ps3 was down for what, a week or a month and got compensated with the choice of three games or something like that. And deal with random outages. There's a reason so many people joked about psn being down at that time.
Oh you mean the time when PSN was targeted and attacked due to Sony's controversial decision to remove OtherOS? Why are you trying to use that to support that it was down often and suggesting Sony had to reward people with games for it being down on a normal basis?
I mainly played online on the PS3 that generation and you are exaggerating things a bit here. It wasn't down that often and most of the time it was just fine.
Meanwhile you could pay on xbox, true, but also get a service worth paying for. I could talk to my friend or in a party with few clicks, and easily join games together.
Believe it or not, XBL was also down during that generation at times. To completely gloss over that is a bit fishy.
I had both generations, and I went from 360 to ps3, and really felt the downgrade
I had both also. Your point?
Feature for feature is really the only area where PSN didn't compete. Uptime wasn't really that bad.
Sure, blame Microsoft for paying for online.
Blame them or credit them for it. Does it matter? They launched the XBL service with a yearly subscription.
But credit them for Sony upping their fucking game regarding online. Now Sony also needs to up their game about backward compatibility and preservation of gaming history.
That's usually what happens when there are competitors in the market.