News Publishers unhappy with PS3 bandwidth fees

Very true, but as a gold member since the start of xbl on the original xbox when it was nothing more than online gaming with VoIP, I was happy to pay the fee back then and I'm more than happy to pay the fee now with all the additional services on offer. As shown by the old PSN on the PS2, making the developers pay for it doesn't work out too well with many games now unplayable online due to the developers shutting down their servers. Developers have enough trouble making mends meet sometimes without additional costs laid on them.

 

Veles, I'm just trying to saying to say that (depending on how you want to report it) MS could be made out to look bad, too, since they are passing the fee onto Gold members (even if they don't download stuff). I'm not saying anyone is bad or good, but based on how someone else's interpretation of it.

 

Yes, that's true, but you can't make them look as bad because the Gold subscribers do get some fairly nice benefits for their money. Whereas developers paying for bandwidth aren't necessarily getting any return for their money since they most likely have other marketing avenues apart from PSN which are probably cheaper and offer more for their $$.

 

It would suck to be a single indie dev and put up a game demo not realizing how many people would download it. Especially if you put up the full game expecting to make a decent amount based on the number of downloads you had to pay for of the demo. Though I don't have a ps3 so I don't know if they have lots of indie stuff there.

 

What if you found out that as a Gold subscriber you were paying $10 more per year (from whatever you paid for your subscription) to pay for the fees of downloading DLC? Again, we will never know what the cost is (if there is any) to Gold subscribers or if MS pays for the bandwidth (which I highly, highly doubt). It just depends on how you want to see it.

Indie developers are currently using PSN exclusively as their avenue for their games, so I'm sure it's not what it's all cracked up to be or what's it being made out to be. For the big publishers, $160,000 (what some are quoting) really isn't that much to reach thousands upon thousands of possible customers and if the title truly is quality and what gamers want then they should make that cost up quickly. Hopefully Sony is doing the most they can to try and keep the costs down and hopefully it will get less as bandwidth costs drop.

 

They get a third party to manage it :! like Fileplanet , Gamespot , Filefront... like if you go to ea site to download a BF patch you see loads of 3rd party links for the patch as they don't want to host it as it cost them alot for their bandwidth.

Now steam manages huge bandwidth cost with exceed XBOX live and PSN by selling loads of games to cover it. They use over 10,000TB bandwidth. They also get free hosting servers from ISP that want to free advertising like iinet does steam content hosting in Australia and they get free advertising in game. Like when you play TF2 and connect to server you will see a small banner with a iinet add. I do expect one day for steam to release a year subscription model as their business model may fail one day as games get bigger in size.

XBOX LIve will probably reduce its subscription fee as its number grow. Currently people are paying :

$50 a year :: $4.16 per month
But you can probably find it cheaper like i did at JB Hifi for $40 on sale
$40 a year :: $3.33 per month