Unsurprisingly, the PC has been the pioneer in this area, just as it was the first platform to really adopt networked multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer gaming, as distinct from online gaming, is just a small part of what is now a much larger tapestry. 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. 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. 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. That doesn't, however, mean that all games have become online games.

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'. Online won, although perhaps not in the way that its most loyal adherents had hoped for.

(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.

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