A closer look at Sony’s Online service

As you can imagine, I look at an online gaming service with a pretty close eye. So imagine my surprise when I was reviewing Sony’s briefing from earlier this week where they announced more details of their online service,  and noticed a glaring omission. Sony has said that their online service is free but on the slide they showed during the briefing, where they listed all of the free services, I did not see match-making or online play mentioned. Thus, it seems quite likely that Sony’s free service is merely the equivalent of the Xbox Live Silver level of membership, which is also free. So, if I’m right then Sony’s cost advantage for their online service is non-existent. What do you guys think?

Here is the video where they show the slide of features that their ‘free’ online service will have.