Today, Atari announced that Test Drive Unlimited was the next game to receive demo treatment for Microsoft's big push to bring the E3 experience home to everyone. This joins Lost Planet in the grouping of games with demos that we know about during E3. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter is also supposed to get another co-op campaign during the convention.

This seems like a real good move on Microsoft's part and will make developers more accountable for releasing good games. This just makes me realize how much of an important innovation Live actually is to the 360 and really puts pressure on Nintendo and Sony to really have their act together with their network infrastructures. Does anyone think that Sony or Nintendo could survive without some sort of Live-esq service for their new systems?

I really don't think Live is that innovative. We've had the technolgoy for years on the PC, and the PS3 and the Wii are set-up to have the exact same service. Not to mention the DS has it for free, and its wireless around the world.

Live was innovative for XBox becuase it was the only console that supported online but now its a commonplace in video games. So no, Live functions on the 60 arent innovative, almost everyone will really have it.

I'd say the marketplace frontend is innovative because there's never really been anything that worked as well as it does in the console space. I don't really think comparing PCs against Consoles is fair considering the huge differences involved. Live on the 360 is much much more then just multiplayer.

It's especially interesting to note that none of these consoles have had an official web browser (as far as I know). That seemed to me the obvious service to become available with the sale of network cables and broadband adapters and yet, these companies have chosen for the most part to lock their content within their own sandbox systems.

There are some good technical reasons (remember WebTV?) for not wanting to render a website on the console's output, but the availability of "unofficial" homebrew solutions shows that it's not impossible. The Dreamcast, as far as I know is the only major console to try supporting this in any way, and even then the software available in the US was far behind the latest japanese release.

Back to the original point, I agree that Live! has made a big impact in the world of content distribution (much more refined than Sega Channel ever was) and is ultimately successful and here to stay. The other major players in this game can't afford to be without this and I fully expect to see some comparable suite software (bundled voice, chat, content distribution, sandbox) appear again on the world of PCs.

The Saturn had a web browser kit.

Yes, but remember, I have a PC that has content distribution. Theres also a little place in my neighborhood called a game store. Why do I need a console to do the same? Preferably I would like a hard copy of something over a digitalized download, especially if the console gets wiped, ny download is gone and I hae to pay for it again.