In a presentation last month, Sony's Kaz Hirai mentioned that Sony was considering a premium PSN service that would come with a monthly fee. New comments from the company show that this idea is clearly gaining momentum.

Speaking to Nikkei Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment executive vice president and chief technology officer Masayuki Chatani again brought up the pay-to-play topic: "In addition to single-payment packaged software, there are also schemes like monthly fees or per-item charges," explained Chatani when talking about new ways for Sony to generate revenue.

Sony already has an array of per-item charges, whether you're talking about PSN content or items in Home, but monthly fees are clearly something different. Kaz Hirai, in his previous remarks, also mentioned the possibility of charging for a premium PSN subscription, but further reiterated that there would always be a free option as well.

"It's not that PSN is being improved with these charges, its that if you want to keep everything PSN offers now you will have to pay. Otherwise a free option will be available like with Xbox Silver (Xbox's free option), but will be limited. BTW there are many annoying PS3 'fanboys' too "

Yea I understand the whole fanboy annoyance.

As for the benefits of premium PSN;
I read somewhere else that if they were to start charging for PSN then the premium users would get several benefits such as in game voice chat (similar to XBL's) and several other things that I can't quite remember. If there would be no benefits then it would be a clear idiotic decision by Sony and probably cause the companies game console popularity to decline greatly...

This is just so PS3 users know what might be coming soon.

I was talking to some friends about how I would rather pay for Xbox LIVE than get PSN for free b/c of the problems I heard on it. And one of my friends showed me this link from GameInformer, although it is older I did not see it posted on here and found it interesting.


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This dates back to December but is still being processed by Sony if they will pursue this or not.
Even though a free option would be offered, it may be limited. Xbox has a free option of Silver but you get updates much slower and have no access to online multiplayer. This could happen with Sony, and then I couldn't think of many reasons people would choose PS3 over Xbox, the Xbox has been cheaper than the PS3 as well.

You know what I got from your post?? "I'm a fanboy here to talk about stuff that I don't know $#!T about so that xbox 360 might actually look good for once" Get your facts straight, Sony has already stated that if it is free now, They won't charge people for it. Btw, their is no problem with PS3 besides a minor glitch in the system today for older models. As a console, The PS3 is what the xbox 360 can only aspire to be. As far as XBL goes, You guys don't have a single thing I want on PSN. Cross game chat is pointless, Why talk to someone playing a different game? It ruins the game, so does playing your own music. It seems that all XBL manages to do is cheapen the gaming experience. Well, I'm off to play my Genre defining, forward thinking PS3 exclusives. But don't let this Lil 'Ol post deter you away from your 100's of lame multi-platform FPS's.