Xfire and Sony in Cahoots to double-team Xbox Live

Per 1up.com, I've come to find that Sony is working with Xfire in order to get features comparable to those of Xbox Live.

According to the article, Xfire can provide the PS3 with friends, tracking, voicechat, server browsing, and profile stats (like gamercards). Those are the features that help make Xbox Live great, so it's no surprise that Sony has to outsource to even attempt to contend with Microsoft's supreme online offering. Hopefully this will make gaming online with a Sony product much less abysmal than it was with the PS2.

What ISN'T mentioned is that there are still a couple of problems.

Sony still isn't hosting any gaming servers; they are leaving that up to developers/publishers. While this leaves the experience "open", this will likely result in unregulated and messy experiences like this gamer is suggesting. In less words, this means modding/hacking/cheating is likely to be more of an issue.

Central Registration may not happen. What is stop different publishers from requiring registration for their services? This problem was inherent in the no-central server setup. This also means that multiple user-names might still be required.

I'm not saying that the experience can't be enjoyable, but it's far from smooth sailing from here. Sony is already putting themselves in a potentially bad spot by relying on another company instead of going in-house. Hopefully it goes smoothly, as they can't afford much more for hiccups in today's market.