I have no problem paying for Live. We've been down this road in this argument a million times.
Bandwidth costs money. Offering that demo, which will be downloaded 2 million times at 5 gigs apiece costs money. And that's ONE item. It all costs them money to host and provide all this content. The fact that EVERY XBLA game has a demo to try before you buy? Costs money. Having access to all the apps, whether you only use one or you use 10, costs money. None of it is free.
Sony is completely regretting their approach. They need that revenue badly. But they didn't go that route to be the good guy. instead, like so many things in the PS3 development and launch, they completely f'ed up. In this case, they totally underestimated the importance of connected home consoles because Japan was way behind in the way they used connected gaming. It wasn't important to them. (See Nintendo.) Sony made online gaming a feature they knew they needed to have to be competitive, but launched with no PSN, no plan, no anything and have been scrambling ever since, with money flying out their door the whole time. They've been playing catch-up ever since, but if they had to do it all over again, they'd follow Live's model much more closely, though likely not exactly.
Why shouldn't the people most heavily using the product support the costs? And why shouldn't the company providing the services make some profit off it? That's the whole reason the company is in business and we have these platforms at our disposal. MS is making money in their entertainment division and they still have large and vocal percentage of their shareholders that wan them out of the console business because they are not making ENOUGH money. Imagine how badly some of Sony's investors want them out of the sector where they are flat-out hemorrhaging money.
These arguments are immature and childish. You want great new games, but you want them to be cheap if not free. You want awesome, reliable, secure service, but you want it to be free. You want more, and bigger and better and faster and more awesome but you don't want to pay for any of it. It's just a completely unsupportable, ridiculous argument.
SONY AND NINTENDO AND MICROSOFT AND DEVS AND PUBLISHERS ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF MAKING PROFITS, NOT GIVING AWAY THEIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR FREE. They don't care about you as a person, but only as a consumer. They care if you're having fun and feeling like you get value, but only so that you'll spend more money on the platform and buy the next one. That is ALL. The sooner you come to grips with that, the happier you'll be.
