Sony Charges Publishers For DLC Bandwidth Usage

tlhIngan writes "Since October 1, 2008, Sony has been billing game publishers for DLC bandwidth usage. The game companies are forced to pay 16 cents per gigabyte downloaded by users (the 'Playstation Network Fee') regardless of whether the content is free or paid. The good news is that free content will only be billed during the initial 60 days it's up, but paid content will require fees forever. (No word on whether free content will mysteriously disappear after 60 days, though.) Given that some popular game demos run over a gigabyte by themselves, it could easily start costing publishers serious money (16 cents each for a few million downloads adds up). So far, it hasn't cut down the content available (or few publishers have started pulling content), but it's too soon to tell. It should be noted that Microsoft isn't charging publishers any money for content on Xbox Live, though some may argue that the 'gold premium content' is the same thing." Perhaps this is one of the reasons various publishers are pressuring Sony for a PS3 price cut.

Comments

$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[Anonymous Coward]

$0.16/GB is what you'd pay to serve content at pretty huge volumes. If they published it on any other website, they'd probably pay more.

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[kyrre]

Amazon S3 is likely one of the cheaper providers of storage. They charge from 17 cents pr gigabyte of download. In addition they will costs 10 cents pr gigabyte. They also charge pr request.

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft, on the other hand, limits the amount of size of the content you are allowed to put up on their marketplace. Certain megabyte allotment, 150 MB at the moment, although it's been only 50MB for a very long time leading up until now. I know this doesn't apply to all types of content, but it does to downloadable games... ...

so who's stifling developers more? ...
yay for wii and ridiculously overpriced snes roms; although this isn't fair to sony: while their ps1 downloadable offerings are cheaper, they really don't seem to be expanding the library much at all, and there are so many ps1 games that fetch too high a price on ebay due to rarity that I'd like to play again.

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[Anonymous Coward]

The downloadable Watchmen game was over 1 GB.

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[Anonymous Coward]

"per" is one letter longer than "pr"

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[GoRK]

S3's transfer fees start at 17c to 10TB/mo. and decline to 10c at 150TB/mo. At the volumes we are talking about for game downloads at ~1-2GB each download you'd easily be at the top end.

And amazon isn't really that cheap either when it comes down to content delivery. It's nice because it's more or less on demand but if you can do a little bit of forward planning, a content delivery network like Akamai can give you better pricing.

Anyway the article is a stupid gripe about a nonexistent problem. Microsoft doesn't charge the publisher bandwidth fees because they choose to charge the customer. Furthermore anyone who thinks they can do it for "free" on their own website is under some serious delusions. A publisher unable to budget for this correctly is a bad publisher. I think perhaps they are just pissed because they can't provide the service and charge for the bandwidth themselves - I bet they would charge a lot more than 16c/GB.

Sony picked a price and terms that are reasonable and cost competitive in the market. There are some ways around it too - game downloads from PSN could contain only skeleton executable files which would download the rest of the data on first start from a publisher's own content servers. The fact that we're not seeing any of this is probably because it's just not that big of a deal. $200K in bandwidth fees to expose a million people or more to your game demo is money well spent. It comes out of the advertising budget and will give a better return than $200K spent on billboards, that's for sure.

Re:$0.16/GB is a pretty good price

[commodore64_love]

Hey... I start almost all my videogame auctions at just 1 single penny. If the item sells at that price (and they often due since few people want ten-year-old games), I HAVE to cover my costs, which are approximately:

2.50 postage
0.50 bubble envelope
0.75 ebay fees
1.00 paypal fees
0.25 misc stuff like foam/gasoline
=================
5.00 TOTAL for shipping plus handling, which is *exactly* the same amount that amazon.com charges to ship a videogame. Apparently amazon feels no guilt about making sure their costs are covered, and neither do I.

Untenable

[Anenome]

Developers do not appreciate this at all. Live is more successful, both from a consumer and developer point of view. Not all consumers want to play online at all, so they don't need to pay for it. And shifting the burden to developers, to put them in a position where the more popular their game is the more money it costs them is not a good position at all.

Re:not all that bad

[Kalriath]

Sounds like Dreamhost or some other equally terrifying overseller.

You do realise that your host hasn't actually got capacity to deliver you 2.5 terabytes right? If you actually managed to transfer that, they'd mysteriously find some way to terminate your account, because they count on you buying "2.5 terabytes" and using 250 megabytes. If everyone actually used 2.5 terabytes, the host would be bankrupted by the end of month invoice from their upstream provider.