There was a universal outcry against the need to create a Konami ID to play the MGO beta. PlayStation 3 came with the promise of a universal login ID, and this certainly wasn’t a universal login. Some were so angered by Konami’s decision that they refused to play MGO altogether. No one was foolish enough to skip the MGS4 story because it. Now that we’re almost a year removed from everything that took place, a reason for the Konami ID may have surfaced: PSN bandwith fees. You may have read about them here.
Sony charges publishers for using bandwith for offering things such as demos on PSN. Now while this wasn’t implemented until a few months after the release of MGS4, they probably got an advance warning just like every other developer. When you downloaded the MGO beta, you did not get it from PSN. It was via P2P networking or an http: connection. This kept Konami from having to pay bandwith fees, as well as share profits for downloadable content, but created the need for a log in aka the Konami ID.
While these measures may have raised Konami’s profit margins, their overall earnings definitely suffered. The ID creation fiasco, which involved Konami’s website constantly crashing or simply not loading up, left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. MGO has a decent following, but the several expansion packs that followed have done little to ease the pain. Konami and EA are famous for redirecting traffic to their internal servers, but it’s not a reliable system and makes online gaming a big hassle. PSN was integrated into PS3 for a reason, and shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of earning a few extra bucks.
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