Home and the PlayStation online strategy is being designed to become a much more comprehensive online virtual market place than what's currently offed up or planned for x-box live.
Imagine a virtual i-tunes store you get to walk around in and download any song from, movies you can stream from a virtual blockbuster video, old arcade games for sale from some developer, company specific promotional areas with set pieces, art work, trailers, mini games, etc. from their new games.
The potential marketing power and revenue streams from something like this are huge (and significantly different than the menu driven system of x-box live due to the tangible nature and social structure of the world created.)
So getting back to the thread, You don't want to charge admission for that any more than you charge people to get into the mall. In fact you want to have incentives for people to come in. You want a guy in a pizza suit waving a big fat sign that says lunch special.
The loss in revenue due to upkeep and maintenance of something like this is offset by the money you can make; with the revenue increasing over time relative to the cost of maintaining and creating new content for it. Plus if you let developers, publishers, media centric companies, and users be in charge of creating content and the thing pays for it's self.
I think Sony's real problem is going to be their lack of marketing 'clarity' required to actually get people to come in to the market place they're creating. How they sell Home and how much companies participate will be huge (If it takes off I think the marketing draw of Home specific features could bring a lot of players over from the all you can eat buffet that is x-box live).
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