AAA titles are an entirely different beast, they always have plenty of word of mouth, and it's easy to try them out either at a friends place, or wherever. Plus it's not uncommon to blind buy the sequel to a AAA game if you liked the prior one. I will blind buy Mass Effect 2 and Fable 3, no demo needed. But Flower? No chance, not without a demo.
But the first ones didn't have demos. Plus I never bought any of these games. I wasn't convinced and waited for the two that I thought I might like until they were platinum releases (Gears 1 and Fable 2). I didn't like Gears 1 (both gameplay and looks disappointed me), and Fable 2 the jury is still out on (haven't played far enough).
So if Sony tomorrow started charging $2.50/mt for PSN, would you completely stop using PSN or would you pay?
Who knows? The differences between the services are currently far too small for me to say that PSN is worth significantly less than Live. Let's switch things around, and say that Live would become free on the 360. Would I use it more? No, because I payed for live for 6 years, and barely used it. I cancelled my subscription because I was throwing away money. Even if I did use it enough each month to make it worth the entrance fee however, that would still count against the cost of ownership of the 360.
Just think about it for a moment: I can currently buy up-to 8 PSN games A YEAR for the price of Live in Europe. So what if I buy one that I play for less than the 2 hours of entertainment the average price of a PSN game is worth occasionally. Trash Panic ultimately didn't click with me, and neither did Elefunk. Did I lose a huge investment there? I still have about 45 euro left that I spent on games that I sunk a lot of time in, like Flower, Wipeout HD, Zen Pinball, and Super Stardust, to name but a few that even with the 'expensive' Wipeout HD amount to about 45 Euros. In fact, the price of Live even during the period that I've owned a PS3 (which is shorter for Europeans) still covers just about all my PSN purchases (ok, maybe excluding SingStar songs and the Fury pack), including larger titles like Warhawk and Burnout Paradise.
Part of that could be because of MS's bizarre strategy of tying hdd pricing to the price of gold. Buying movies, dlc, etc, makes them money whereas user content does not. So if they are going to fill someones limited hdd, they want to fill it with money generating content. Just a guess on my part though. Once they offer proper hdd pricing, as well as larger hdd options, then it should be easier to offer more user generated content.
This is not their problem. LBP levels take about 5MB per level. You can download 200 levels into 1GB. Trial HD levels are way smaller than that still. We can only hope that other developers may profit from Forza 3 developments on this front, but so far, no dice. Nevertheless, Forza is a nice example of how they contradict themselves when they deny a service to others that they open up for themselves, for in Forza you can also create all sorts of obscene and copy-righted materials and even "sell" them. This is potentially an even bigger legal problem, but here Microsoft makes an exception.
The harddrive is Sony's memorystick from last-generation - it's one of their important keys for hiding hardware profits from the psychological consumer price-purchase barrier. This policy is biting them in the backside right now though as it starts eating into their Live revenue in terms of content sales.
Mind you, in the US, there's still some value-add going on in terms of additional services connected to Live. In Europe though? Except for the tiny bit of effort in the U.K., Live currently doesn't deserve to be a paid service, in my honest opinion. Though allow me to stress each of those four words - even the tiniest of features may be worth a lot of money for those that really, really want it.
