Sony looking for "the best way to approach" charging for PSN

Sony's Peter Dille has told IGN that the company's "actively thinking" about charging customers for its PSN service.

Furthermore, he also revealed that Sony plans to offer fewer titles via download only, partly to help out retail stores.

"It's been our philosophy not to charge for [PSN] from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that's something we're looking at," said Dille. "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".

On the digital distribution front, Dille said that plans to go digital only are not in the cards at this point, and it's more to do with broadband and helping out retail partners.

"We have an advantage with PlayStation 3 from an optical media perspective because a Blu-ray disc contains 50 gigs," he said. "Maybe [digital distribution] will come at some time, but today to download 50 gigs of data before you play a game, you could probably go buy a car, bring it home, put your family into it, drive to the store buy and bring the game home by the time you [could download it].

"I think we're on the forefront of digital distribution [and] we're working very hard to evangelize it. I think we've got a hardware platform that continues to grow with people's appetite in digital distribution. And we've got multiple units with hard-drive sizes up to 50 gigs.

"We're also working very hard to make sure we do this thoughtfully so that retail has a part to participate in the ecosystem with us. But, the notion of getting all your games digitally, I just don't see it happening.

"There's games you're going to get at the store, there's games you're going to get on PlayStation Network and there's some you'll get in both places, and then there's also opportunity to enhance the micro-transactions and add-on content, of course, but getting God of War III digitally? That's just not something you'll be seeing anytime soon".

During the same interview, Dille said that Sony's very confident that PS3 will beat 360 within a 10-year time-frame.

Full thing is over on IGN.