Pachter: PS Plus needs 2-3 million subscribers for PSN to profit

[dallas]

Zkuq said:

I'm probably missing something here... But last I checked, Steam must have been profitable 'cause it's been around for so long already. It's not the same but it has many features that PSN has.

dallas said:

morenoingrato said:

why? I don't see this costing a lot to sony

the PSN has a lot of people just playing games on them lol , so sony has all kinds of bandwidth to pay out, and the wifi is certainly the most expensive kind of bandwidth out there as it runs on the same data networks as your laptop will, that's why your laptop internet subscription costs $70 a month lol...... mabey sony has to pay perhaps half or a quarter of that per PS3 owner, since it's a single corporate customer, and so AT&T/verizon/Tmobile only have to deal with Sony instead of 500 other companies for aumatic wifi agreements, but still this costs them some $$. 

 

Maybe things are different here... But what exactly do you think is so expensive with WiFi? It's also called WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network, Wireless LAN), which means it's LAN. It has nothing to do with your internet subscription. So, what am I missing here?

exactly, but this runs off of the big telecom's data networks which power your laptop's internet (if you have a service) as well as things like text messages.  So, sony/MS have to have a pay per rate kind of agreement.  Now, Since sony is just 1 customer that they have to deal with using all of this data versus 36 million PS3 owners doing the same thing, i'd imagine that Sony would get an awesome rate off of it, but it has to be expensive as people sometimes play for 2-3 hours at a time.