Adam Bruno

Thus far, Sony’s biggest advantage over Microsoft is that their online network, while not as robust as Microsoft’s own XBOX Live, is free. Well, for now, anyway.

It seems that Sony’s starting to have other ideas. “…Will we charge for it or why don’t we charge for it?” said Peter Dille, Sony Senior VP of Marketing. “It’s been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz [Hirai, Playstation CEO] recently went on the record as saying that’s something we’re looking at. I can confirm that as well. That’s something that we’re actively thinking about. What’s the best way to approach that if we were to do that? You know, no announcements at this point in time, but it’s something we’re thinking about.”

Well, that’s not exactly a good thing, but apparently, they’re not planning to simply go the standard “monthly fee for play” route that Microsoft has traversed for so long. There are various subscription plans in the works, ranging from $5 to $25 a month. The 22 suggested services listed in these plans ranged from the rather gimmicky “Early Access to All Store Content” to the much more ambitious “Full Title Trial – 1st Hour is Free.”

This doesn’t quite count as a subscription for online play, but New Media Age recently reported that Sony and Future Publishing have partnered to bring First Play, a downloadable gaming magazine, to the PSN. As of right now, it will be exclusive to the PSN, but you can bet things’ll fall through pretty quickly if the whole subscription thing is a bust. Look for First Play this spring, available for both monthly and annual subscriptions.

Now, the good news is that as of press time, Sony has no plans to charge players for simple online play. So, if we’re going to start paying for PSN services, it’ll hopefully only be for new services that it doesn’t already offer. Naturally, this puts the new service ahead of XBOX Live, at least in that regard. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Or maybe Microsoft’ll wise up and stop charging for online play. Hey! It could happen!

Source: Yahoo! News