Darth I will say you tragically miss the point here. And I say this is in the nicest way possible cause I like you. :)

But Sony have on their owned assured that PSN will never ever have as much content as Live and never be as big. So many Publishers and devs will pull out of DLC and the like, especially as LIVE just keeps getting better and bigger. And Gold membership is sky rocketing, so Sony have really destroyed their own service. PSN should have had a fee from day one. Being free has cost them money and is now hurting their relationships with Publishers and devs.

Until they go bankrupt or get bought out due to this and other reasons. Then you might not get the games you want any longer (or with the quality you'd desire).

There really is little need for a fee.  Like has been said,  Sony offers full game DLs (Unlike XBL).  It also offers many advantages that you can't get on Live (In terms of flexibility) and doesn't impose limits on developers. Until now atleast,  now developers will try to keep their file sizes as low as possible to keep the cost down.

And I find it so ridiculous that people continue to parrot this idea that just because you pay for it, it's so much  better or more worthwhile. Please. 

You should NEVER be hoping for a 'paid' service.  You already pay for internet, the console, the video game and then the console based internet service also? That's one of the best things about PC gaming in general.  If there is ONE thing Sony did right from Day One of this generation, it was having a free network.  The content between the two systems is comparable, as is the performance.  Yet when you add up the numbers, you end up spending more in the long run for an Xbox 360 system + Live,  for essentially lesser hardware.

The PSN has allowed me to enjoy my games (Send messages back and forth, voice chat, and play games online with my friends with relative ease) and provided me with a steady source of additional content.  That's all I can ask for.    

Very few developers will black ball the PSN because of this.  Very few.

While it seems strange, I can see why Sony would do this financially. Bandwidth isnt free for even big Sony. I don't think it will affect devs much. If it costs $5 on them (that would be on the extreme side) for their game to be downloaded, they will pass the cost on to the customer. So that $10 game will cost $15 instead. In a greater reality, that $10 game might cost $11, or the dev might just take the hit if its only a matter of 20 cents. While Sony and I are on different ends of the spectrum for BS they've pulled, I don't see this as a "showstopper" decision by them.

Well I do disagree with you quite alot. PSN is brilliant for how long Sony have had it running for. But LIVE provides so much in form of 8 multiway chat, messaging, video chat etc etc. And alrady over 300 movie downloads in SD or HD. I belive it will now cost M$ far less to gain exclusive DLC of likes of GTA type exclusives.

Paying for Live is next to nothing a week. And many people I know here in the UK also have problems playing some games on PSN. Disconnection being the main gripe. Same connection same house this doent happen with their Live games.

I belive we are now seeing where the fee for Live is going. Sony have been losing money keeping PSN afloat. And that is obvious by pitching on the devs and publishers.

meh .. another angry fan.

Sony charges publishers,Xbox360 charges customers.
How is what Sony is doing bad for us customers ?

And come on, all the cost the developers incur is 16 cents per Gig of DLC they release... As for free content, my understanding is that it will only be charged the first 60 day and then it will be free for publishers so they won't remove it...

Lets say the average DLC is 10$ and 500 MG, that's 8 cents extra cost for the publishers, a whole frigging 0.8% increase in cost.........................

Well network issues aside (I get no issues connection wise to PSN or XBL).  The point is,  while XBL still IMHO has some more 'polish' on it.  The core of all that I could want is all there for PSN.  

Sure, the XBL yearly fee is a plink in the bucket for most people on a week to week basis.  When you add it up though, across a generation (Let's just use an arbitrary 6 years).  You clearly can see how those yearly fees start to add up.  The 600$ price tag for the PS3 doesn't even seem so astronomical when you put two and two together.   Especially with the 360 lacking Blu-Ray and WiFi. 

Some of the fee for Live is going to this I'm sure.  Then again, Microsoft has restricted developers bandwidth in many cases and doesn't provide full game downloads.  So they aren't exactly giving their developers the carte blanche to placing their content on XBL.  (Which PSN pretty much does).   It's two different approaches with two similar endpoints.  I don't think it's going to effect much at all.

I don't think your looking at this correctly "Its only .16 per G" ?  If you have a 1gig demo and 2 million people download it thats running into a lot of money  $320,000 to be exact.    What happens if even more people download the demo?  Not to mention a lot of demos are over 1gig in size.

I don't think we can say the endpoints are really similar. In one case developers are simply restricted, in the other they probably restrict themselves and have to make an extra payment on top of that.

In all honesty none of this would be a big issue if publishers weren't already suffering from record expenses on HD development. In the end this is one more thing pushing publishers away from the PS360 and towards the Wii, so it's good news as far as I'm concerned.