Can i just say how damn right you are. Microsoft are money sucking leeches when it comes to online.

Yeah, they better offer a free online gaming plan next gen or I might not jump back in at all. I'll wait for a year anyway this time, once bitten twice shy. If there are not a couple of exclusive compelling single player games by then I guess I might as well stick to 2 consoles instead of 3.

I was pretty much only using my 360 for zune movies after Alan wake, but that's on hold too now since the video playback is broken since the dash update.

The idea that charging for PSN would benefit sales is so far off the insanity chart I'm gonna need a telescope to figure out where it is.

PS3 has a lot of users, and potential users, that don't want to pay for online gaming. EVER. They are already in direct competition with Microsoft, they just happen to offer a free product. Forcing people to pay for it would be disastrous.

Xbox 360 users who pay for online services aren't jumping to PSN+. There's not much incentive to do so, however superior the service may (or may not) be, if all their games are already on X360.

I would be rather upset if they were to suddenly charge for basic access. I use PSN, but not regularly enough to warrant a subscription. Free PSN can be MAJOR factor in the reason people buy a PS3. Having to pay for it, just like on the 360, would not increase sales in the slightest. If anything, they could go down, because despite offering a cheaper service, it's not free! "Free," when used honestly and legitimately, is a great marketing tool. In MY personal opinion, honestly free online gaming is superior to paid online gaming, whatever bells and whistles they may add to attract nerds and FPS nuts.

Subscription to PSN is a guaranteed lose/lose situation. Sony is smarter than that............sometimes.

Sony has the right idea, look at my last post on the last page. It's a video showing you the scam that is Xbox Live. Microsoft is basically forcing consumers to pay for their own online servers instead of third parties doing it. Sony make third parties pay for their own servers which is why PSN is free. They have no reason to make us pay outside of PSN Plus.

Well there is a small possibility that sales might increase if Sony started charging for PSN. Many people falsely assume that Xbox live is a huge leap over PSN just because Microsoft charges $60 for it. They think that just because they are paying for it, xbox live just has to better. In reality though PSN and Xbox live are very similar give or take a few feature like party chat which isnt added just because PS3 hardware can't handle it. If Sony starts charging for PSN and does revamp the service a little, then sales might actually increase.

/my 2 cents

I honestly don't understand how charging for online would help them.  As it is, Sony is way behind Microsoft in terms of online gaming presence and charging for the (slightly) inferior service isn't going to make things better.  The perception really isn't "Live is better because I pay for it" so much as "Live is better because that's where my firends are".  That won't change simply by charging for the service.   If they can develop a rich set of tools to make PSN+ a better deal, such as the things available on Live that they don't have yet, then they could earn a little more money from that.  As it stands, however, it's not likely that they can even afford to charge for online unless it is dramatically better than Live.  They are losing on the online front because MS developed their service first and have managed to maintain a lot of users who believe that they have to keep paying to make their previous investment worthwhile (a common fallacy).  Really, the best thing they could do is make PSN as close to equal to Live as possible before the generation ends so they have a chance of taking consumers back next gen with a free service as good as Live.

Watch this. If Nintendo and Sony follow Microsoft it will be an extremely bad day for gaming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqymlqNWiYI&feature=related

Microsoft charges us for third party servers. The extra ten dollar hike was because Kotick of Activision wanted a cut because of how big COD was on Live. Look it up.

Threads like this make me feel ashamed to even speak with people in the gaming community...

Since when did gamers care more about the console companies making more money than caring about the actual gamers themselves?


Absolutely disgusting mindsets I have seen given life this generation...

I always thought they explained the hike for LIVE was due to MS securing 30-day exclusive CoD content for 3 years.