The gaming console world has no shortage of its own “fanboys” in either the Playstation or XBOX camps.  But with E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo coming up in a few days, one has to wonder what if anything will be mentioned of the state of these gaming networks.  We have seen the Sony PSN and related networks go down to a sustained series of attacks, while in the meantime the XBOX network has endured without interruption and have in fact during this time introduced the Hulu Plus offering on their flagship console.  On the surface it seems that Microsoft’s game offerings are performing much better than Sony is.  I don’t want to get down any more on Sony, but all you have to do is look at the fact that millions of gamers were unable to use the network for an extended period of time.

With the release of Hulu Plus on the XBOX 360 platform, Microsoft in addition to the Kinect technology is positioning its game platform more as an overall entertainment device than ever before.  There are reports that the Kinect offerings are about to triple, a welcome advancement as the Kinect has about a couple of dozen games available at this time.  There are several things that Microsoft is doing right with this and the timing could not be better.

Of course Sony deserves a chance to come back from these devastating incidents and I suspect that they will try to throw all they can at restoring the prestige and brand recognition they once enjoyed.  With no shortage of loyalists, we may see new features and offerings that will work towards this effort.  With the PS4 in development it remains to be seen if Sony changes its ways and embraces the open source community.  Their disassociation with that segment is often referred to in the series of security failures that culminated with the PSN network breach.

Any potential announcements may reveal the direction that the platforms may be going with in the future.  For the time being it appears that Microsoft’s XBOX is gearing towards a family entertainment center and Sony Playstation is a gaming purist’s platform.  During Sony’s outage and difficulties, combined with the Hulu Plus release it very much appears that XBOX Live network completely owns on Sony’s offering, at least the average consumer.  Sony’s brand has been compromised as a result of these events and this is rather unfortunate, yet predictable circumstance given their now-obvious continued security problems.  They really could use a home run of some kind as it appears that the momentum is in Microsoft’s favor.