| DarkD said: I wouldn't be so sure that Sony doesn't have a hand in that. Sony is without a doubt taking a licensing fee from the developers using that service, and my bet is that the license is ridiculously expensive. Afterall, Sony has to make money off the service themselves. |
Of course they will have a hand it it, they're not going to let a publisher charge crazy amounts like $0.05 or $100, but it's pretty obvious they have no strict guidelines yet. You have many titles being set at a perfectly reasonable $7/8 for 30 days, then others that charge twice that for no reason. Some have even skipped the 7/30 day options all together and gone with only 4 hours or 90 days. It feels almost random.
That's why open betas exist though. They can look at peoples feedback to the prices being set, see which games and rental options are popular and which aren't, and build their guidelines with that data. I expect they're also using that data to work out what sort of value people will expect from a subscription option (which they've mentioned is coming).
Sony are exclusively offering a new method of content distribution, but they certainly don't have a monopoly. People have several other methods of buying their games, so Sony have nothing to gain from intentionally overcharging. All that will accomplish is getting people to stick with their current purchase methods rather than moving onto PSNow.
