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The debate about online gaming is over. (Although the debate about whether one can be "face to face" with a capability will perhaps linger.) While we've spent the last five years - and longer, in some cases - talking about whether online functions were actually important to games, that discussion is now at an end. Online won, although perhaps not in the way that its most loyal adherents had hoped for. Every next-gen console, and even every recent handheld console, now sports an online service out of the box; networks are becoming a core element of what we could, if we were being a bit pretentious, call "the gaming ecosystem".
That doesn't, however, mean that all games have become online games. We haven't dispensed with single-player, and we never will - for many people, compelling experiences come from storytelling or cinematics, not from deathmatch or 40-man raiding parties. It's still hard to tell just how many people actually care about online gaming in terms of actually playing with other people, but it's certainly a fairly small, albeit growing, proportion of gamers. No, the real explosion in online has come from other areas - such as the ability to get game demos, to access new content for your games, to communicate with friends, to create an online identity for yourself and even to download entirely new games or retro titles over the network. Multiplayer gaming, as distinct from online gaming, is just a small part of what is now a much larger tapestry.
Unsurprisingly, the PC has been the pioneer in this area, just as it was the first platform to really adopt networked multiplayer gaming. You've been able to download demos, shareware games and indie software for years, and of course communicating with friends and creating an identity for yourself is core to the PC's online functionality. In the console arena, Microsoft leads the charge; the Xbox was the first games console to have a broadband, fully functional online service that gave users friends lists, notifications, voice chat and so on as a core part of the console, rather than as a strapped-on afterthought, and Xbox 360 builds on that to a massive degree with services like Xbox Live Marketplace and Xbox Live Arcade.
Sony, on the other hand, is late to the party. The PlayStation 2 didn't even have a built-in network port, let alone a network service as part of the core offering - and while isolated online titles like Final Fantasy XI proved massively popular on PS2 (in places where it was available, anyway), even the most die-hard Sony fan couldn't exactly describe the PS2's online service as a success. Certainly, it had more users than Xbox Live did last generation - but then again, the PS2 also had an installed base five times larger. In terms of ease of use, consistency of interface, and simple accessibility - not to mention software support - PS2 online was a distant second place to Xbox Live.