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...

the only thing j-tags are ****ing up is mw2.

i was playing a hacked game on xbox the other day and it wasn't MW2:confused: JTAGS can hack all games on xbox not just MW2