Sony charging editors for PSN?

L

liolio

Aquoiboniste
Legend
I've just read that:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6206459.html

Supposedly Sony taxes editors 0.16$ per GB downloaded from PSN.
Taxes runs for 60 days for free content and forever otherwise.

Do you know if this is true? Do you think that this will have an impact on Demo and DLCs available on the PSN?
Could this explain why lately some DLCs didn't make their way to the PSN?

Shortly what are you guys thinking about this :)
 
Just a ridiculously stupid decision, but not at all surprising given Sony's mismanagement of the PSN from the start. Only another item in a long list of stupid things they've done in that sector.
 
Sankari said:
The money for running PSN has to come somewhere. It might have an impact but I'd assume not much.
Click to expand...


Should make it harder to compete with MS. If MS is offering cash for exclusive dlc and sony is charging for it , it could be a problem and most liekly is a problem for sony. This should let MS get more exclusive or timed content. Even demos are subjected to this fee which most likely explains alot of whats been going on.

I personaly rather pay a small monthly fee up front then get charged in other ways behind my back.
 
Agree, though I found MS's "subscription" based services not a good thing but with the price down through e-bay sellers a mere €3 a month isn't too much considering that that pays for my new demos and DLC.
 
Better them than me...

Look, I would rather they increase the price of DLC by the corresponding amount to cover expenses and demo costs get written off in marketing budgets. Much better than paying $50 a year to fund "free" bandwidth for publishers.
 
It's publishers, not editors?

Also, you think publishers don't have to pay Microsoft anything for Live?

Personally, I think it's a good alternative incentive to keeping the demoes and games to a reasonable size - i.e. make the bytes worth downloading, if anything. Microsoft has done this by setting a cap for certain categories.
 
Money needs to come from somewhere to run the service and from a consumer perspective I like that I don't have to pay for it. From a publisher perspective it sucks to have that additional cost that no other platforms charge and it would certainly be more attractive to cater more to another platform for those specific reasons but most will probably put up with it and eat the costs in their marketing budget. This has been in place for close to 6 months and I have not seen any slowdown in content coming to the PSN. Any exclusive content that has been seen on other platforms were previously arranged and announce prior to the implementation of this pay fee service...unless there is something I am missing. Maybe this is why the Tomb Raider demo was never released on PSN?

Though, what is worrying to me is small independent developers and those who self publish on the platform. That is now extra expenses they have to worry about.

I also can't completely pin this as being a problem, there could be other costs that no one is aware of in producing content for each platform.
 
Sounds pretty sensible to have a fee coupled to the size of the download.

This should encourage game developers to develop systems that keep the size of patches and demos small. This benefits the user by saving them time and hard disk space.

Comparisons to Microsoft are useless as:
1. We don´t even know if MS also has some kind fee coupled to patches and demos.
2. These fees are probably subject to negotiations when console-royalties of a game is discussed. These royalties will most probably also differ between MS and Sony, so one company may have the download fee implicitly included in the royalty deal and the other may not.

We also already know from developers in previous threads that the console-royalties varies from game to game depending on a number of parameters. As those details are secret to us speculations are quite useless.

What we do know is that server bandwidth costs money and somehow it will be the consumer who pays for it in the end. Keeping the size of dlc small will probably be a win-win-win deal for all three, Sony saves server bandwidth, developers save money, consumers save hd space and time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You could see other things like, game trailers or footage not appearing on PSN because there are lower cost alternatives available.
 
Obviously it would be the impression that publishers would avoid PSN because they have to pay something, as opposed to similar services on other platforms.

So far as far as I know exclusive DLC has everything to do with moneyhatting and nothing with these kinds of stuff though? Until I hear publishers complain it seems a non-issue ...
 
Arwin said:
Obviously it would be the impression that publishers would avoid PSN because they have to pay something, as opposed to similar services on other platforms.

Until I hear publishers complain though ...
Click to expand...

Yeah, until we hear them complain, then we can join in.
The only issue i can see with this is demos costing the publishers actual money to get in the hands of the customers. Well, i consider that marketing and if it removes 4 movies of logos from the startup it´s all good :)
 
Arwin said:
Obviously it would be the impression that publishers would avoid PSN because they have to pay something, as opposed to similar services on other platforms.

So far as far as I know exclusive DLC has everything to do with moneyhatting and nothing with these kinds of stuff though? Until I hear publishers complain it seems a non-issue ...
Click to expand...

Yeah, assuming that there is not a value associated to having a slot in the "latest" section on the PSN store would be pretty naive. Not to mention the large top spot. All ads cost money somehow and demos and trailers are most certainly ads.
 
Arwin said:
It's publishers, not editors?

Also, you think publishers don't have to pay Microsoft anything for Live?

Personally, I think it's a good alternative incentive to keeping the demoes and games to a reasonable size - i.e. make the bytes worth downloading, if anything. Microsoft has done this by setting a cap for certain categories.
Click to expand...

According to the article publishers pay a liscensing fee for both xbox live and psn. On top of that though you are charged 18cents a gig on psn.

Yeah, until we hear them complain, then we can join in.
The only issue i can see with this is demos costing the publishers actual money to get in the hands of the customers. Well, i consider that marketing and if it removes 4 movies of logos from the startup it´s all good
Click to expand...

But does it ? And also are you now getting that content later than its avalible on other platforms? I don't see how that is all good.

So far as far as I know exclusive DLC has everything to do with moneyhatting and nothing with these kinds of stuff though? Until I hear publishers complain it seems a non-issue ...
Click to expand...

Its alot easier when to money hat when you start at 0 and your competition is starting at negative 18cents per gig.

Agree, though I found MS's "subscription" based services not a good thing but with the price down through e-bay sellers a mere €3 a month isn't too much considering that that pays for my new demos and DLC.
Click to expand...
You can regularly find xbox live for $30-$40 in the states per 13 months. Thats $2.30 to $3.07 a month. When I look at the content avalible on it that isn't availble on psn it seems like a good value. Lost and the damned , fall out 3 dlc , tomb raider dlc , tomb raider demo , resident evil demo ahead of time and so on and so forth.

PSN isn't up to a quality level that i would pay for yet and since i already have live and a huge friends list it be hard to justify paying for psn. But if i didn't have live then i would gladly pay for psn if it kept it on par with content.
 
For PSN games at least, the 16 cents per GB must be compared in relation to development cost of a retail game, the price of a producing a disc and doing physical distribution?

Sure its skewed since you most likely pay the same price for a disc regardless of filling it with 1GB or 25GB.

Not sure how stock is threated for games, if the stores have stock return options etc?
 
eastmen said:
But does it ? And also are you now getting that content later than its avalible on other platforms? I don't see how that is all good.
Click to expand...

This is 6 months old, i didn´t detect anything missing. I didn´t notice publishers reducing the size of their demos either. If this turns bad on Sony then we can complain, right now it´s users making the case for those that they end up paying for the games anyway. Since when are we supposed to complain about their costs in development/marketing?
 
eastmen said:
According to the article publishers pay a liscensing fee for both xbox live and psn. On top of that though you are charged 18cents a gig on psn.
Click to expand...

I can´t believe people turns this into anoother vs. debate without having any details whatsoever. Perhaps the fee of microsoft is larger to begin with? Perhaps MS has already a tight cap for the size of the content. Perhaps it doesn´t make much difference for the publishers, maybe they just have to be more concerned about the size of the PSN content than they previously needed to be.
 
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