if you own a Playstation 3, you should be mad as hell.....

[PrototypeMike]

As of October 1, 2008, Sony began imposing a "Playstation Network Bandwidth Fee" on all downloadable content. This fee bills game publishers every time a user downloads games, demos, trailers, movies — everything — from the Playstation Network.

Charges run 16 cents per GB of content transferred — whether the content is free or paid, but free content is charged only for the first 60 days of availability on the network.

This appears to be Sony's way of covering massive corporate losses while allowing the network to remain free to users. By contrast, Microsoft charges Xbox Live users $50 a year to connect.

And it's a novel way to go about it. If someone wants to make money on the Playstation Network, why not add a little somethin'-somethin' to help keep the company in business and the service free?

But a bandwidth fee is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and if you own a Playstation 3, you should be mad as hell, because with this ill-conceived move by Sony has all but guaranteed that you'll be sorry you don't own an Xbox 360.

Here's why: A one GB demo downloaded one million times will result in a $160,000 bill from Sony. Sony is very hush-hush when it comes to exactly how many times any of their Playstation Network content is downloaded, but it's safe to assume that, with more than 20 million PSN users worldwide, there's a good chance that most of the big demos and trailers will get at least that much attention.

And publishers are already feeling the pinch of these fees. According to a source quoted in MTV Multiplayer's blog: "“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."

This isn't some secretly coded, deeply veiled, idle threat. This is an outright admission that publishers are actually weighing whether they want use PSN instead of some other service — like Xbox Live, which doesn't penalize publishers for putting up popular content.

In other words, Sony has effectively made putting anything on the Playstation Network a no-win situation for publishers.

Put up a big, glorious demo to promote your title? Fine, but it'll cost you a fortune every time someone downloads it. Gimp a demo and shrink the file size? Fine, unless it gets downloaded four million times.

And what value is it to a publisher to put up a beautiful 1080p demo of its amazing game if it can only afford to make it 10 seconds long? Or, worse yet, charge users for the demo?

And that's only if you're a big company that isn't working on a shoestring budget. If you're Q-Games or Southpeak, why offer a demo at all?

But who really gets it in the teeth are rhythm-game fans. With music licensing fees and other associated administrative and development costs of publishing add-on songs for games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the profit margin on these songs is very fine. Add in a new fee and you can bet that you'll be seeing that the price of these songs.

By imposing this "bandwidth fee" Sony has effectively turned the PS3 into an exclusive-only console, because if given a choice between two consoles to buy a game — one of which offers you better expansion content for better prices — customers will choose that console.

The only time they will chose otherwise is if they have no other choice but to buy a game for the PS3. And the PS3 doesn’t have enough exclusive titles to keep it afloat in the next year.

And if you're a publisher, Sony has, in one fell swoop, effectively guaranteed that you'll be making your demos, trailers and hefty add-on content exclusive to Xbox Live.

Honestly, Sony would have been better off charging a small amount to consumers, because although it would hear a lot of whining, at least it wouldn't be gimping future content of its online store.

I don't know if Sony will be smart enough to back off of this plan or change the fees so they don't penalize good publishers with good demos. But until it does, I can almost hear the cackling from Redmond.