In a recent opinion poll, 74.7% of the PlayStation 3 owners surveyed considered Xbox Live to be the online service with the best feature set when compared to PlayStation Network and WiiConnect24.  In addition, 71.4% of the people that actually own an Xbox 360 feel as though Xbox Live is worth the subscription fee.

Possibly even more intriguing is the fact that of the people that owned all three consoles, meaning they had the option of playing multiplatform games online for free, 63% still found Xbox Live to be worth the price. Another statistic that I found particularly interesting is that an in-game XMB is the feature most wanted on PSN, even more so than Home, Trophies, and further PSP integration.

The survey was conducted by Game Informer and printed in their August 2008 issue.

First off, if you are forty-four years old and purchasing a $600 item without doing your research we are willing to bet that you are either single or extremely wealthy. Ask any man in a relationship and he will tell you that the key to making a high priced purchase is being able to justify it to the boss lady.

Secondly, we aren’t sure about the rest of you, but when we were six years old, we weren’t taking polls about Beta and VHS technology. We understand that consoles are often purchased for children, but we don’t know many children that could tell you the difference between a Disney DVD and a Disney Blu-ray.

Of course these are the results of just one survey, however it does make you wonder if cramming high priced gadgets into a machine essentially made for gaming can continue to be justified. The Nintendo Wii console is doing just fine without them.

Source: arstechnica.com