selnor said:
thismeintiel said:
selnor said:
thismeintiel said:
@selnor
Do you honestly think Sony provides PSN for free. LOL. Come on, do some research. True it is free for the owners of the PS3. But for companies to put games and demos on PSN, Sony charges them. They also make money off of costumers who buy/rent from the PS Store and Home. Sony is definitely making money off of PSN. I doubt they are going to change their model any time soon. Besides, that is definitely one of the draws to the PS3. Being able to play online for free, just as you would on any PC.
@heruamon
I'm sure DC will be handled just like Free Realms is. Free to play, but it just costs money for the top of the line items and equipment within the game. |
Those copanies are only charged when the demo or DLC is actually downloaded. They are charged for bandwidth. Some demos are lucky if they get 2,000 downloads. So no Sony are making nowhere near enough charging companies that. Blizzard are smart and charge alot more than Xbox Live for 1 month of WOW. LOTR online charges as does Dungeons and Dragons. Warhammer Online as well. All the most used games on PC online are charged. Live charges and people obviously feel it's the best online service, as more play on Live and use Live than they do on Wii!!!!!! Which has sold alot more.
What I'm saying is, from a business point it will change and has to. Cetainly the bigger it gets the more maintenace costs are. If they dont charge to play with PS3 they almost certainly will for PS4. As it is there service crashed with MW2 and it had 1 million less online with it than the 360 version at the time.
Think from a business perspective. It's not viable. As a customer it's nice for awhile, but Sony will have to recoop money from somewhere. And it will end up being a paid service.
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And what about all those games that don't charge to play online and yet can continue to stay running? Besides there is a difference between a game company charging to play online on their game, as opposed to MS charging to acces your internet you already pay for, just to connect you to said game. What happens if a game on 360 decides to start charging for their online? You'll have to pay the game company to play their game on top of paying MS just to access that game.
The point is they both have different pricing structures. And neither is going to change it anytime soon. Sony will continue to offer free play online, while MS will still charge for it. This new premium service isn't going to change that. And really it doesn't matter what the business "experts" of this site really think, Sony is going to continue doing their thing.
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The point is how long can Sony maintain a service like PSN without recooping costs? I bet theres at least 50 wages involved daily in the running of services like Live and PSN. Then theres the R&D of those services. In many respects it's like the costs of a never ending game development. That cant stay free. It's a cause for bleeding money. And NO company can justify that. That is apparant by this move from Sony. If game playing stays free, the question is will many opt to subscribe for this higher service? If they dont what do they do next? Hmmm.
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Do you have records to show how much PSN costs to keep running? Do you know if the money that Sony makes off the service isn't enough to keep it going? We all know that Sony loses money off of sales of the PS3, as they report that. However, we don't know what it costs to keep PSN up and going. My guess would be that since they haven't charged to play for 3 years, and have no plans to change that, they at least are breaking even. This new premium service is most likely a way to start seeing some profit off the service.
