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Sony May Charge For PlayStation Network
In an interview with IGN, Sony's VP of marketing, Peter Dille, responded to a question about the PlayStation Network by saying that the company is considering charging for the service. He said, "It's been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that's something we're looking at. I can confirm that as well. That's something that we're actively thinking about. What's the best way to approach that if we were to do that? You know, no announcements at this point in time, but it's something we're thinking about." This follows news of a customer survey from last month that listed possibilities for subscription-based PSN features.
From a purely business perspective, MS must be making a killing on live. Sony gaming needs to make some money somehow: they're still making loss on every PS3 sold, their investment in exclusive games has produced some good games but they've all been fairly mediocre sellers, the PSPgo is a massive flop and PSN must be eating some money.
Last I read, Sony had lost more on the PS3 than the profit from PS1 and PS2 combined. That's seriously bad business.
Multiplayer is free, I couldn't care less. I don't want "Early access to content" or the like, I just want to fire up Street Fighter and get my ass handed to me. I don't want "Exclusive themes" or access to psone games I played a decade ago; I just want to be able to virtually shoot a guy in the face once in a while...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
The problem is, whilst yes, the PS3 is making headway, it's coming at too big a cost to them.
It's not clear that the PS3 is even making a profit on the hardware itself yet, certainly it wasn't even as recently as 6 months back. The PSN costs a lot to run, so they're effectively subsidising that too. This of course becomes more of a big deal when they have to fund additional features to try and keep up with XBox live but do not receive income for it like Microsoft does with Live.
So yeah they certainly have momentum now, but it's costing them too much to be sustainable, so they have a choice of breaking even and pissing people off, or continuing to haemorrhage money in the hope that some day they will indeed be able to make it all back.
Microsoft made the same mistake with the original XBox in that it costs them a fortune, but they learnt from it, sure they still lost money on the hardware for a while, but not so much that they couldn't get it profitable within a few years. They also realised that XBox live is a good way to help fill that gap, in that by charging for it, they're both avoiding losing money there, and making up for some of the money lost on the hardware as well as being able to use the money to fund continued development.
Of course, I agree it's nice to have things for free, but sometimes that just isn't practical, at least in the long run. I'd wager this is why Nintendo didn't really bother with a decent online experience at all- because it would be just an additional cost for them that detracts from their profit.
What, spreading the word that your service is free by telling people you plan to charge for it? Colour me dubious. Some people care about the cost of being online, some don't, and as far as I can tell the only affect this would have is to put off the people who were attracted to the free service because they know it can be yanked at any time.
Sure they might do another announcement that they considered all the options and decided to stay free, but what's the likelihood that it'll get anywhere near the coverage this will - we all know that bad news sells clicks or whatever it is big media's in the market for these days.
That means more customers for Nintendo and Blizzard Entertainment / Activision then...
You are really using Blizzard as an example of a non-pay for multiplayer company?
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