Policy Shift: Sony Now Charging Publishers Bandwidth Fee
Publishing sources have informed MTV Blog about Sony’s previously un-reported “PlayStation Network Bandwidth Fee,” which is forcing them to reconsider the release of free content on PSN.
Prior to October 1, 2008, videogame publishers who wanted to offer free downloadable content, such as demos, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 didn’t have to worry about receiving a bill from Sony or Microsoft. While the millions of downloads a popular demo or free add-on content can make gamers happy, they also rack up some heavy bandwidth costs. Rather than asking gamers to foot the bill, they’ve asked publishers to compensate them for these costs instead.
The problem, however, is that publishers already pay a licensing fee to get their games onto PSN and Xbox Live, and this simply taxes them in an unexpected way. This most likely hasn’t happened on Xbox Live due to the $50 annual fee that Gold Members pay for the service. PSN lacks any sort of user fee, thus the bandwidth fees become noticeable on Sony’s end. The official charge is 16 cents per Gigabyte for all content posted on PSN for the first 60 days. Afterwards, the bandwidth fee is dropped.
[Source]
4 Responses to “Policy Shift: Sony Now Charging Publishers Bandwidth Fee”
So assuming 100,000 people download a FREE demo, 1 GB in size, off the PS Store within those 2 months, that’s $16,000 to put up a free demo? Yikes.
Yup. It’s a scary thought for any publisher, and the smaller devs will probably forgo any sort of demo release on PSN. But demos can also be harmful to games that aren’t very good. Case in point, Tomb Raider: Underworld. The demo for that game was exclusive to the Xbox 360, and it subsequently sold a lot better on PS3.
Weird stuff like that happens all the time. It sucks that we’ll probably see Free DLC disappear, though.
I believe they said posted not downloaded.
could we see a fee for the PSN real soon??? I would guess yes, but that’s just me.