Sony charging publishers 16 cents per Gb for PSN content

Holy crap! I can see why they do it but this isn’t exactly going to get publishers flooding to PSN.

In two minds about this. It’s better than charging customers for the service (i.e. Live), but it’s still pretty crappy for publishers and it means we’re less likely to get freebies.

Is there anything to show how much they are making on the purchases as opposed to paying. I dont see how if no one made money of PSN, why are they still making games for it?

Just one more sign that Sony are struggling.

**Within two years…mark my words…**

It isn’t “free” to do on the web. Bandwidth in massive multi GB chunks costs money. Someone has to pay, there are just different ways of doing it.

As much as demos/trailers etc are as much if not more so a tool for publishers as well as consumers I think Microsoft’s way of doing it works out for the best. A small publisher who just happens to make a really popular demo could easily get done on PSN and have to pull it, which helps nobody.

Doesnt Micro limit the amount of space that they can use though?

In other words Sony get a share of what 3rd parties make off DLC sold off the PSN. If that means that the users dont have to pay anything then i’m all for.

ibetjnmswassayingthat2yearsagolol

Not really, because they do it ( according to the article) on free stuff as well. So even though a Demo is free, SONY makes money on it, to pay for bandwidth.

Damn… didn’t really think of the demo situation (dumb really as it’s mentioned in the article! )

Even less chance of getting PSN demos.

Thats true, i really dont agree with them taxing free content thats over kill imo.

Shatner – i’ve been seeing people complain about whenyouwritelikethislol , i just want to say that it makes me laugh every time. justsayinglol

sonyaregenerallydownondemosduetohostingandbandwidthcostslol

You know, really thinking about it, how many games, demos on the servive are 1 gig? I dont remember that many.

maybe thats why demos always come at 720 instead of 1080.

No that’s because the game are in 720p most of the time anyway.

*games

Sony take a much lower % of profits on the actual titles sold though right? as opposed to Microsoft

Wonder if this is by region, could be a reason for the content getting delayed in PAL areas all the time…

Syrok – you know that Sony only adds 1080p when its native right? And Micro claim 1080p even though its upscaled?

I would much rather have native 1080p like KZ2 than a fake 1080p.

True HD on possible on Blu-Ray.

*only possible on blu-ray.

(WHERES THE EDIT BUTTON?)

I’ve heard grumbles about region specific issues and putting content up on PSN before so I wouldn’t put it past them to bill this by region and send three bills for SCEE, SCEA and SCEJ.

“True HD on possible on Blu-Ray.”

Oh, really? How come Wipeout HD is in HD? That’s not even 2GBs large.

“I would much rather have native 1080p like KZ2 than a fake 1080p.”

Yeah… umm, about that.

i mean 1080i. just saw that. good catch Psycho.

Dont know about you, but my copy says 720p lol.

I got mine from gamefly. Could have sworn i seen on the net that its native 1080i. OK, bad example. Uncharted then.. right? am i good with Uncharted. I have the case for that one.

SHEET !!

Uncharted is native 720p. US release supports 1080i (scaled) but the Euro release doesn’t.

That said… who cares about 1080i other than those with ancient HDTVs?

OK. well the point of it all is that SONY puts native resolution on the box. I know there are some, even though ive been pwned as to which ones, that are native 1080p.

Uncharted was only 720?? damn that looked good.

There’s only about 25 games that are native 1080p, most of those don’t have boxes.

Gran Turismo is in 1080p and so are Wipeout, Flower and probably some other PSN titles, but very few of the big games are natively in 1080p.
Skate 1 could be played in that resolution, but only with some slowdowns.

“most of those don’t have boxes” lol.

Well, getting back to the topic fully, this doesnt really affect the publisher if they stay below a gig right ?

So its not as bad as it seems. Def NOT sonys doom as stated above.

Hope this doesn’t mean fewer demos on PSN

Well, it wouldn’t if they are only charged if the demo is a gig. I wonder if that can be cleared up?

Do they get charged if under a gig?

Its a price to pay to get your game advertised

Has anyone questioned the source?

SERAPHEMZ; Surely it means ever gig of bandwidth used by downloaders? The file doesn’t have to be 1gig, it could be 1mb, but if it’s downloaded 1000 times, that’s a gig of bandwidth that they have to pay 16 cents for.

Besides, no publisher could possibly be losing money on a game from that kinda thing, that price is miniscule compared to how much the downloader would have to pay to download it – then multiply that by however many people have to download that particular game to make it up to 1gb of bandwidth to charge them…

It’s hardly a terrible, irrational thing.

Can mount up pretty quickly though. As you can see from Pat’s example in the story.

But a demo 1GB in size is likely to be a blockbuster game from an EA, Activision or Ubi. Hardly cottage-industry companies struggling to survive. Smaller devs usually have demoes around 50-100MB which will incurr a charge of 0.8-1.6c per download.

This fee no doubt contributes to the profits margin that SCE have identified for their PSN business model. If they didn’t charge it here, their model would need the lost funds from elsewhere. A bigger bite of the profits from sales? Charging customers? Or change the model and make even less money at a time when Sir Howard is wielding his scythe?

I don’t know… given the losses even the big publishers are making lately I get the feeling even they wouldn’t be too pleased to see another $160,000 wiped off their balance sheets.

But yeah, Sony is between a rock and a hard place on this one obviously and it’s better that the costs get passed on to publishers than customers. (Though we all know who’s paying in the end one way or another. )

The simple fact is, it would be great if nobody had to foot the bandwidth bill but Sony or MS, but at the end of the day, it’s just too much money to lose without any sort of kick back.

MS choose to charge the user, Sony choose to charge the publisher. Both ways are understandable, but providing it doesn’t lose the PSN content, I’m happier that it’s not me having to foot the bill.

Is there any evidence that this is costing the PSN content anyway? I mean Midway – who are in a world of financial hurt – just put out a huge free update to UT3, when they could have just left it as a PC exclusive.

There’s no evidence (at this point) that the charges are proving prohibitive to publishers, certainly we would have seen some sort of effect at this point, if the rules were changed as far back as Oct 1st.