Report: Sony Now Charging to Release PS3 DLC, Publishers Not Happy

[admin]

Sony has instituted a "PlayStation Network Bandwidth Fee" that requires publishers to pay for each gigabyte used in downloading PlayStation 3 content from the online PlayStation Store, reports MTV Multiplayer.

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For example, a 1GB demo downloaded one million times within its first 60 days of availability would incur an extra charge of $160,000. Between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Capcom has seen over 4 million downloads of the recent Resident Evil 5 demo.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57760

It's like Sony *wants* to lose

[doctorhardware]

Sony is doing everything they can to kill the PS3. No game developers will want to pay a download fee. They will quit developing games for the PS3. It is hard enough to develop games as it is now. It is just another nail in the coffin for the PS3.

[admin]

Can't believe they actually want to charge companies like Capcom a quarter/half million dollars just to host the demos ($300,000+ for RE5, for example, if the number of downloads were split evenly between 360 and the PS3), which in turns helps to sell PS3s and earn Sony a nice profit from licensing fees. They say it's because PSN is free compared to Xbox Live, so that money has to come from somewhere, except Xbox Live Silver is free and all demos are free after the first few days. All this will mean is that even more demos will now be Xbox 360 exclusive, which will then mean more game sales for the 360.

The problem I think is that Sony lacks the infrastructure worldwide to host a managed network environment. This is not a problem for Microsoft, whose vision of cloud computing means they're connecting hundreds and thousands of new servers every week anyway.

The latest NPD game sales stats show that it's now 4 months in a row that the PS3 (and the PSP, PS2) has been selling *worse* than the same time a year ago (whereas the Wii, DS and 360 have all increased in sales, 54/74% for the 360/Wii last month).