At the heart of it, I think people are trying to make it seem like one fanbase would be more lenient than the other, but honestly, I think people against certain things will be upset, regardless of their current console choice. If I recall correctly, Angry Joe is an Xbox fan, and he was very upset after the Xbox One reveal. Similarly, charging for online multiplayer would probably not go over well with many current Sony fans.

It's not about making money, it's about covering the cost of the infrastructure.  AKA bandwidth.  It's expensive as hell, and people simply don't realize it.  On top of that, Microsoft is expanding Xbox LIVE from 15,000 servers across the globe to 300,000 servers.  19 times the infrastructure.  In order for Sony to even begin to match that, they would have to charge an access feel.  They don't have enough corporate assets around the world to sell in order to scale their infrastucture without it.

Okay, so it's just an industry rumor? This is quite different from what crazy buttocks does, and mortimer's track record has nothing to do with it because he's simply saying what he's heard that other people have heard. I have no doubt that he has heard this, but it's all third (or fourth, or fifth...) hand information and just hearsay at this point.

I'd be pissed with pay-to-play online, to put it simply. I'd consider upgrading to a decent PC instead if it happened.

As for DRM, I won't spare it any thought until something gets announced. There are so many ways to lock old content, some of which I could maybe get around and some of which I couldn't.

Interesting hypothetical, but I will wait and see.

I'm loving the "Sony fans will justify it" replies in here though. Highly amusing.

Wasnt the paying for online not already confirmed on the ps revival? Sounds not new to me. And i really dont care as i dont play online.

Because if you come up with a solution to a problem, which you may need in the future, you'd be wise to patent it because if one day you need a solution, and all the better ones are patented, then at least you have the one you came up with to fall back on.  You don't always patent for today, but smart companies always patent new ideas.  Whether they're going into a current product or not.  You can always improve a patent, but you can never go back and patent an idea you had that someone else patented.

I don't know how the internet will react but I would be quite angry with them because they have remained very quiet about the issue and all their comments have been very sketchy so clearly they wanted MS to break the bad news first and get all the backlash.

True but given Kotaku has said the same thing Im inclined to believe that where theres smoke theres fire. Just like there was with the Xbox One

Yes, Sony would have to invest money, sure, but MS *is* making money off it. The "problem" Sony has is that they are not in the position like MS. MS has been building their cloud-servers since several years and already are used for other applications and demands can shift dynamically in the cloud. They are ready already for high demand.

Btw, look what Yusuf Mehdi said about game streaming and Xbox One:

"It won't be streaming full games any time soon.

 Though companies like OnLive are pioneering games processed in the cloud -- and the PlayStation 4 will initially let players demo portions of games via the cloud-based Gaikai service -- no such game-streaming capability will be available on the Xbox One for the foreseeable future. "If you're talking about full game streaming, the technical reality of that is that that's multiple years off in terms of having a complete system that people will really look at and say, hey, that actually works for me in terms of latency and performance," explains Mehdi. Instead, the Xbox One will use its cloud computing services to augment games."

Oh, how many times did I say this in this forum...

I think the backlash will be pretty subdued. We'll be seeing reactions like "Well, we all expected it!", or "If it makes the entry price of the system cheaper then this is a plus", or "I never buy used games anyway so it doesn't bother me".

It's only a matter of time now, surely. Plus everyone will blame EA and Microsoft, whilst pointing to the Wii U as being a "failure" for not implementing these systems.