Sony Charging developers for PSN space now

Sensationalistic BS "news", not really what AVS is for thanks.


Nice flame bait.

what this will do is make a demo even less likely for a given non-SOE title. You KNOW they won't charge themselves.

Just when you think Sony can't get more stupid.

I have no doubt that this thread will be closed soon, but I'll bite...

This "news" is not new; Sony's been charging this fee since October of last year. That's six months ago! It only seems "new" because the gaming media just got a hold of this tidbit of info, and we all know how much the gaming media loves to foretell "teh doom" of Sony.

If we were going to see a change, it would have already taken place.

Sounds like some random lower-down at a publisher decided to air some (irrelevant) dirty laundry when he/she should have just kept his/her mouth shut.

Yeah, I assumed they've been doing this all along. That's one of the reasons they set up these services - to make money. I'm sure MS charges too for Live.

Nah, most likely MTV games (publishers of MTV-owned Harmonix's Rock Band).

FYI, the fee is waived after 6 weeks on the free stuff.

Are you telling me that Sony is trying to get some money for their completely free online service via the playstation store?

I guess this doesn't surprise me. In a lot of ways, the store is like a giant ad for developers, so why not charge? I'm also curious how microsoft handles things. Not to compare and start a fight over who's better, but I'm just wondering if they charge anything or not. I would think costs like that are covered via the subscription fee, but I don't really know.

Almost anything that helps keep the service free for us, I'm ok with. (Assuming it doesn't kill the service completely in trying to do so, haha.)

TV stations charge companies to advertise their products on the airwaves as the public watches programs for free. Oh noes!!1

Another dumb non-issue that's actually old "news". I'd rather the companies work the download charges into their prices rather than Sony forcing me to pay monthly for PSN whether I use it that month or not. I wouldn't be surprised if Steam charged publishers on the PC this way as well, which is another great distribution service that I enjoy for no extra $$$ on my computer.

Really? I would say you don't alot about business then.

Post above mine makes perfect sense

Somehow the consumer pays for everything, that aside. How is it a fairer business model to have the consumer pay for advertising? I can't think of many other products that have an advertising fee. New cars I suppose but no one thinks they should pay that.
Of course publishers don't like it. If they started charging me for PSN I wouldn't like it. Maybe the headline should be "Sony unhappy publishers are mooching bandwith" Also, if a publisher can't look at past trends and figure out a marketing budget they should hire a new marketing manager.

As a business owner and consumer I can tell you it doesn't really matter who gets charged, because in the long term if the company pays more so does the consumer. Companies just past the cost on.

Actually, MS only charges SOME consumers. What's not really fair is that XBL Gold members have to pay for the bandwidth used by XBL Silver members.

Gold members (heh) get demos a week earlier than Silver members. It all works out.

You all are also mistakenly assuming MS isn't charging publishers for XBL distribution. Rest assured, they are. As I said above, the issue here isn't about charging or not charging publishers. The reason this was "news" was because it's an unusual method, not because Sony is *gasp* charging publishers for online distribution.

Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all charge publishers for online distribution.

Really?

The publisher quoted in the article said that they don't.

I'm assuming we'd have seen the effects of this by now and since I haven't I'm not really going to think too much about it. I would chalk this up to irrational fear.

You may have already seen the affects of it, but you just don't know it.

He also said hosting on the web is free so unless they plan on putting demos on MySpace I'm not sure what he's talking about.

I think his point was that demos are still there and DLC prices haven't gone up or are different that other places. Of course you knew that.

I know that I've played the Super Street Fighter HD demo on XBox Live, but I went looking for it on my Playstation 3, and I couldn't find it.

Coming from an MTV source wouldn't it be likely that Web and broadcast advertizing have costs that are absorbed by the larger company. I mean if they are running game ads on MTV they might not be paying for it but are incurring an opportunity cost of that commercial against the corporation. Same with the web stuff, that has a cost too in labor, bandwidth, servers, etc. It might not be $.16/GB over a larger number of dl's, but I bet the cost for them to distribute those first 1000GB's is considerably higher

Isn't that an issue of Sony not requiring all games to have a demo? Lots of games don't have demos on the PS3 because Sony gives devs/producers that choice.

Could be. We aren't likely to ever find out.

Not as though they could force publishers to offer demos, anyway, since they charge them for the bandwidth they use.

Note: PSN is absolutely, 100% free. If I had to pay for accessing the PS3, I wouldn't have gotten my PS3. One of the main reasons I'd didn't get an X-Brick is because of the pay-for-play philosophy MS has. (On top of the piss-poor reliability of the console itself, and the lack of ANY baseball game worth playing).

The dynamics of how PSN is run are complex enough to not warrant unsubstantiated rumors based on old news that so far hasn't shown itself to bear any sort of ill will between them, their content providers, and ultimately you the consumer. I'd like to believe that Sony has at least an inkling of understanding on how to run their business and what agreements to reach with their partners so really is it too hard to just accept that this is a part of the business of running their service? Really wouldn't you have heard more of a commotion over this by now? Mountains out of molehills my friend...

If it was really turning developers off, you would've heard about it back when they started doing it, on top of being able to see the difference in the amount of content coming each week.

And the thing is, if a company puts out a crappy demo that no one wants, the costs will scale down really low so they don't end up paying a lot to begin with. If you are getting a lot of down loads, then good for you.... you're likely to get more sales as well.

If it were a high flat fee (like Super Bowl commercials), I could see how some might be screwed over a bit if their demo wasn't popular. But that's not the case so it shouldn't be a big deal to advertise your wares in a way that internet sites/magazine ads/TV commercials can't offer.