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Bookmark this page. Within the next 12-18 months, you’re going to load it up again, and stare, agog, at my awesome powers of prognostication. “BUT HOW DID SHE KNOW?” you’ll wonder. I’ll tell you.
Actually, I’ve been telling anybody who will listen (so basically the hobo outside my corner café, who might actually be discreetly dead) for ages now that the PlayStation Network wouldn’t – couldn’t! – remain a free service forever.
The most obvious reason, of course, is that if people can be persuaded to pay for a service, then sooner or later, somebody’s going to realise it and charge them for it. That’s probably the most basic principle of business. And a few years ago already, Microsoft proved that people are willing to pay for online multiplayer. It’s taken Sony a bit longer to cash in, maybe – but better late than never, I guess.
And perhaps it would never have happened at all – I mean, the free PSN service is definitely one of the PS3’s big attractions – but now… this. The entire network has been offline for three weeks now, and it looks like circumstances could push that into a whole month or more. The enormous inconvenience and frustration of gamers aside, the loss of revenue for publishers and Sony itself is almost certainly in many multiples of digits. On top of that, Sony’s proposed identity theft insurance scheme is going to cost them a gigantic, glittering heap of dragon gold.
Where is that going to come from? Keeping the PSN free is now a financially unsustainable business model. Besides paying off several million insurance policies, Sony now also has to maintain a previously unprecedented level of security and quality assurance on the PSN – and not just to keep gamers playing games, but to reassure publishers that none of this is stuff is ever going to happen again. Simply, the PSN has to improve pretty dramatically, and PSN users are going to foot that bill.
Yeah, yeah, Sony’s promised since forever that they’d never charge for the PSN. I’m sure nobody over there ever banked on the PSN Apocalypse of 2011 changing all of that, either*.
So, formally then, here’s what I officially predict is going to happen next – Sony will either announce that access to the PSN will be sold as a premium altogether, or cut the features of the free service so much that it just makes sense to pay for a PlayStation Plus subscription instead. On the bright side, you’ll probably get cross-game chat.
* Although there’s probably a rather compelling (if utterly mad) conspiracy theory somewhere on the internet that claims the entire PSN shutdown was engineered by Sony as a pretext to charging users for the service. Anyone?
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