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Sony's PlayStation Network: no-win situation for publishers?

23.03.2009
Edie Sellers of the and 's Stephen Totilo have been reporting on a sobering trend for publishers using the PlayStation Network. Basically, since October 1 of last year, Sony's started charging a gate fee of 16 cents per GB to publishers for users to download their content. Sony used to foot the bill for the bandwidth, but this is no longer the case, making publishers less willing to slate their stuff for PSN releases.

As MTV puts it, game publishers are not happy.

"Publishers already pay costs for creating a demo, a process that can run six figures. Sony?s fees add a new expense. For a demo that is sized at exactly 1GB and is downloaded one million times, that would add an extra [US]$160,000 that Sony is now charging and that, according to publishing sources, Microsoft isn't. That's what could scare publishers from placing content on the PS3."

SF Examiner also weighed in the news, claiming that Sony is effectively driving publishers away from the PlayStation 3, giving a crucial advantage to the Xbox 360's online network.

In other words, Sony has effectively made putting anything on the Playstation Network a no-win situation for publishers.

Put up a big, glorious demo to promote your title? Fine, but it'll cost you a fortune every time someone downloads it. Gimp a demo and shrink the file size? Fine, unless it gets downloaded four million times.