Would you pay to play online?

[welshbloke]

OK I will put it this way... In Scotland and Wales they do not pay for perscriptions but in the England they do. A lot of people suggest the English should not pay for perscriptions and should be like the Scotland and Wales. Unfortunately it is a simplistic argument, in the case of Wales and Scotland they now have a funding shortfall so services which are available in England are not available in Wales and Scotland. Some of the services such as guranteeing seeing a consultant promptly if diagnosed with Cancer seem to me to be more important than paying for the occasional percription.

Now currenlty the PSN network costs money you guys do not pay for it so how is it funded? I can argue the case for PC games being mostly free because most of the servers are run by Clans and so are subsidised and to a small degree some of the PSN network is subsidised (Demos, purchases etc).

The 360 on the other hand makes you pay for the only really valuable service "online play" which in my mind means that at some point PSN will stop being free it just does not make economic sense to continue subsidising this free service. I very much doubt they will bring it in during the life of the PS3 but the PS4 may see some changes. I think if running these services was small change it really would not matter but everytime MS posts results and huge profits based on its members this just heaps further pressure on Sony after all if I was a shareholder I would be wondering why we were not tapping this revenue stream.

I think the question here is would you continue to play online if PSN Multiplayer became chargeable and like the 360 Gold members I think the answer is yes. If asked would I want to pay obviously the answer is no.