Sony charging editors for PSN?
- Thread starter liolio
- Start date
I still am of the opinion that this is not of major concern. I don't think we'll see large changes in the way things are done. At the most, we'll see fewer free videos from 3rd parties...but who really watches those anyway?
Last edited by a moderator:
PSN DLs are slightly faster for me in the Bay Area. I have downloaded the same demo on both many times. They are both slow though. Both are on Wi-Fi.
Dominik D
Regular
You wouldn't read too much into what leak?
And, again, you're wrong. It is a "premium" price for bandwidth if you're talking about hundreds of TB. In fact with all the bandwidth consumed by PSN, Sony probably pays around or even below $0.05 per GB, 1/3 of what they charge content providers.
You wouldn't read too much into what leak?
I think he means not to trust the actual number given by MTV Multiplayer as the actual, final cost per GB. We don't know who leaked this to them, whether it was a disgruntled on-the-lines guy or someone higher-up, and since this was brought up as a complaint we're probably not going to hear about the best-case scenarios.
You wouldn't read too much into what leak?
And, again, you're wrong. It is a "premium" price for bandwidth if you're talking about hundreds of TB. In fact with all the bandwidth consumed by PSN, Sony probably pays around or even below $0.05 per GB, 1/3 of what they charge content providers.
But no one knows for sure if Sony has a similar pricing structure for the content providers. I mean if you asked me how much Amazon charges I would tell you $0.17 per GB. Is that the full truth though?
Dominik D
Regular
Denial is not just a river in Egypt, tirminyl. Report says $0.16 per 1GB and this is all we know. I can come up with lots of ideas when and why it would be less (or more) severe for the content providers, but the fact remains: content on PSN is burdened with extra costs.
It is cute when one claims otherwise though.
There may be upsides of this situation as well, sure. But please separate made up points from publicly disclosed ones for the sake of a healthy conversation.
It is cute when one claims otherwise though.
There may be upsides of this situation as well, sure. But please separate made up points from publicly disclosed ones for the sake of a healthy conversation.Yes, the fact remains. What doesn't remain are the details. Your claim is that amazon is cheaper. And this is quite likely true (amazon competes with similar services, while Sony has no direct competition), but taking some back-of-napkin calculations based on unconfirmed numbers as some sort of factual evidence to base conclusions on is jumping the gun a bit.
Really? So PS3 owners can get their demos from XBL? It's not direct competition -- and the last number I saw for multiplatform owners was a fraction of the total userbase (something like 15%) from an old Edge NPD article, and that includes the Wii.
Also, even if you want to consider it direct competition, whatever Sony charges it's more than Live! does, so clearly they're not competing on price.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
You wouldn't read too much into what leak?
And, again, you're wrong. It is a "premium" price for bandwidth if you're talking about hundreds of TB. In fact with all the bandwidth consumed by PSN, Sony probably pays around or even below $0.05 per GB, 1/3 of what they charge content providers.
That may be true, but I'm going to guess Sony also has to run a data center. And that is NOT cheap to run and maintain (ignoring initial investment cost to get it up and running).
I'm sure it's probably not anywhere near 0.16 USD (since Amazon seems to be able to do it cheaper) but it's probably more than 0.05 USD.
So yes, Sony is probably making a small profit off dev's by doing this (which is a shame for Dev's especially the smaller ones) but not as much as might seem.
I guess it's just the cost of doing business on PS3. If dev's don't like it, they can feel free to stop developing games and go X360 exclusive.
Regards,
SB
specwarGP2
Regular
My thoughts exactly. The people criticizing this fee make it sound like these publishers are doing all of us a big favor by developing PS3 games and releasing a demo, when in reality they need PS3 to help recover development costs and PSN to help market their games.
Dominik D
Regular
Like?
Ok, let's assume for a moment that original report was missing on the variable bandwidth fee. Why would this be left out if report was detailed enough to state that free content doesn't require paid bandwidth after 60 days? It was detailed in that part but wasn't accurate enough to state that prices _start_ at $0.16?
Perhaps...And pulling "facts" out of nowhere to claim numbers are wrong is ok? Difference in prices is pretty large for successful content to ignore it. If you have some interesting counterarguments, your own back-of-the-napkin (or better) calculations, please feel free to share them.
This is not a discussion on what someone thinks is relevant. Ridiculing arguments without countering them with your own is going to lead this topic to a stall and ultimately to moderator's lock.
So PSN is not a service competitive to XBL(M)?
Why are you changing this into a discussion "but XBLM is not free!"? First of all: silver accounts have access to the content as well (for free content that access is deferred we two weeks though).
Second of all: this is discussion about platforms from the content owners' perspective.
Third of all: this is not a discussion of what model you or I prefer. It's about PSN charging bandwidth fee from content owners and potential implications of that. Changing it into vs. thread is yet another way to get this thread locked.
They also have to pay lawyers, but that doesn't mean content providers should pay for that. But even continuing comparison of Amazon to PSN, Amazon S3 in the same RE5 example would cost extra $0.15. But let's even say they have to use at least 1TB, not for the 1GB they use. It's $150, negligible price when we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
This is all you need from Amazon's perspective: storage and bandwidth. This is all demo needs. Please also remember that on both PSN and XBLM demo has to go through certification which is a flat fee that should/could cover the storage/data center maintenance costs.
And you think this is positive for the people using this platform?
What I really want to know is if this affects patches. I think back to UT3 and Burnout. In the past, Burnout's huge content updates came in as patches... but UT3's latest update was separated between a smallish patch and a huge chunk of free DLC. Of course, this may mean nothing.
From the perspective of a PS3 owner it is not competitive. If a publisher wants to advertise a game for the PS3 I would be very surprised if they put the PS3 demo up on XBL. I mean come on....
Ok, let's assume for a moment that original report was missing on the variable bandwidth fee. Why would this be left out if report was detailed enough to state that free content doesn't require paid bandwidth after 60 days? It was detailed in that part but wasn't accurate enough to state that prices _start_ at $0.16?
Perhaps, yes. Do you have any data to the contrary? Do we have official word on this? We have the annoyed grumblings of publishers to a blog with no obligation of accountability. Because it's written on the internet it's 100% true? This might very well be true, but we don't know, do we? It's not a sane response to read something on the internet and believe it's the truth, nothing but the truth and the whole truth.
I'm not pulling any facts out. I'm saying: you don't know squat besides a handful of data and neither do I. I wouldn't bring my own calculation up because there's none to make. It'd be pointless, it'd be math with made up numbers.
And who's ridiculing? You're the one behaving passive-aggressively, you're the one working off one unconfirmed number, one entirely speculative number and using that final result as if it meant something. As to the mods locking this, are we going off-topic? We're discussing the initial report.
Not when it comes to pushing demos on the PS3 audience.
Relative quality of the services might factor into console purchasing, but I imagine it's a minor factor compared to, say, 'which console do most of my friends own?' (or 'which console is cheaper?').
I said no such thing, you're just having a kneejerk reaction. What I said is what I wrote: even if you want to consider the systems direct competitors from a publisher's perspective, which I don't believe they are, they're not competing on bandwidth pricing -- not the way Amazon competes with other, similar services. PSN's pricing scheme launched already being undercut by Microsoft. Not that this is especially relevant, just responding to your tirade -- I was pointing out why I expect PSN's service to be more expensive than services like Amazon's in the best of cases.
Okay, I'll bite. If the flat fee covers bandwidth costs, why is it more reasonable to expect a portion of the end-users to subsidize these accrued operating costs than to expect the content providers to do so? Or it's not, and you believe the platform-holder should pay for these costs entirely, in both cases?
Last edited by a moderator:
The PS3 and Xbox 360 are competitors. PSN and Xbox Live are competitors. To pretend otherwise is simply folly.
And Sony charges more for the PS3 than MS does for the 360, so clearly they're not competing on price. Right?
No...they're competitors. In every way.
This is pretty silly for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the assumption that a PS3 owner is and will always be a PS3 owner exclusively.
Games are going multiplatform in general these days, where possible -- and in such cases, demos are released on both PSN and Xbox Live. They are competitors.
I honestly cannot believe some people here are trying to argue semantics that Playstation Network and Xbox Live are not competitors. Do you guys know what you're saying? I cannot fathom this level of absurdity. What's even more absurd is the person who made the claim to begin with has both Xbox Live and Playstation Network IDs next to that very post.
Look, at best you can say it's monopolistic competition, but it doesn't really fit that either. I'm imagine an actual economist would find the term for this, but they're not direct competitors, which is what I said originally. But this is straying off-topic.
Finally, a note: I did say that they're not competing on price. I wasn't referring to Gold XBL subscriptions at all, but rather the bandwidth charges. To clarify, Sony clearly isn't competing on price there -- they can charge whatever they want and the publisher will never be able to go to XBL to reach the same audience. They can also decide to withhold content if it's not interesting to them, but that's pretty evident.
There is no such assumption. Where did you see this assumption? Please, enough with knee-jerk reactions. What I'm saying is that there aren't a lot of multi-console owners. Here. It's about a year-old, but I was way off with my initial numbers. It says 3% have more than one console. Do you think that's changed dramatically over the year?
Yes, I own both systems. What does that have to do with anything? Do I think I'm your average game owner? Of course not. I'm not extending anecdotal evidence as hard facts. My own experience doesn't really matter.
