Sony is trying their best to keep Playstation Network free for their userbase and the latest attempt could upset a few publishers as Sony will introduce a bandwidth fee on the Playstation Network.
So what does this mean to us? Absolutely nothing, but to publishers it could mean something. Sony will be charging publishers a bandwidth fee when PSN users download content. This fee will cost 16 cents per gigabyte downloaded, this fee does apply to free and paid content, publishers are only charged for the free stuff for the first 60 days of Network availability.
You are probably thinking that 16 cents isn’t alot but if you do the maths it can add up drastically. 1 million downloads of a 1GB demo will cost a publisher $160,000, so what will make them release a free demo on the store if they have to pay for it?
It probably doesn’t seem as bad as this, afterall the network is still free for users.
2 Responses to “ Sony to charge publishers a bandwidth fee on PSN ”
I thought they had been doing this for a while already. October 2008 maybe?? People reckon this is the reason why publishers sometimes release content on XboxLive before, so it means that anyone with both systems will obviosuly download it on the Xbox first and then not have to bother getting on the PSN. This way they dont lose as much money through people downloading it solely on the PSN or on both.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, the simple fact is that this won’t cost publishers a penny in the long run.
As with everything else, they’ll simply add this on to the cost of something else, such as future DLC for a game. This is probably the reason why DLC for games like Dead Space comes in at the relatively strange price of £2.39, rather than the more ’standard’ £1.49 or £1.99.
However they work it, you can guarantee that the devs and publishers won’t let themselves be out of pocket because of it. At the end of the day, it is only us – the consumer – who will end up paying this fee.