Considering this has been the most requested feature for years now, I can see Sony making serious bank off of this. Next step should be to remove all ID’s from their database that either haven’t been used in several years, or have 0 trophies.

Personally I don't care because I am very happy with my name but still very nice to finally see this feature. There were a lot people who asked for it.

had mine since 2008, i don't see a reason to change it yet. It's good to have the option though.

They haven't exactly been going in order of the to do list. Based on the price set for an ID change, you would expect if this was an easy task, they would have done it sooner to be able to reap the benefits of all the name changing that would have taken place up until now. If it were easier to do, they may have charged less as well, but if one company is already charging for it, assuming their competition won't charge at all is pretty unlikely. It's nice when it happens, but businesses hate to give away anything for free or pass up potential profit at any time.

This makes me believe they aren't mostly lying when they say there was a bunch of work to it. With PSN basically being set up around the same time as PS3, and the big plans they had for PSN then and going into the future for PS and SNY, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine they weren't exactly anticipating 'what if' scenario's in case the PS3 ecosystem didn't pan out as planned. While focusing on making PSN and PS3 work together as efficiently as possible may have made sense back then, it probably has lead to headaches now that they've changed direction considerably with PS4.

The fact that PS has stressed that games before April may or may not function properly with the ID change, seems to mean there is a portion directly tied to the games themselves, which says to me the devs will, or may have to, patch older games to make this functionality work as intended. I somehow doubt those devs are going to just do this for free, which means PS would have to work out a deal to entice them to do so, meaning it's not just PS that has to modify their own existing system, it's third party devs, etc, as well.

This will cost money, and PS no doubt wants the gamers who asked for it, to pay it off. Whether or not they continue to charge once they've covered the costs, that's questionable. I wouldn't be surprised as long as the competition charges for it, that the paywall remains, but maybe it will become cheaper when PS is solely making profit from it. It's also a good business strategy for PS to keep free ID changes in their back pocket in case they ever need a sales or momentum boost in the future.