Sony Charging For PSN Downloads?

According to the MTV Multiplayers Blog, Sony is charging publishers 16 cents per GB downloaded from its Store, and naturally, some game publishers are not always happy about it. Multiplayer say they have information to confirm that “for free content, like demos, those charges apply only during the first 60 days of the content’s release” but for paid content, like map packs, “the charges rack up in perpetuity, or until that content is removed from the PlayStation 3’s online store”.

“It definitely makes us think about how we view the distribution of content related to our games when it is free for us to do it on the web, on Xbox Live, or any other way — including broadcast — than on Sony’s platform,” one publishing source said to Multiplayer. “It’s a new thing we have to budget. It’s not cool. It sucks.”

If true, this is incredible: as far as we know Microsoft offer no such charge to publishers, and could go some way to explain why we don’t always get the same demos as the 360 does. As the site says, if a 1GB demo (as is fairly common these days) is downloaded one million times (the RE5 demo was apparently downloaded four million times) that would end up being an extra $160,000 that Sony is now charging and that Microsoft isn’t. Something to think about, eh?