During Sony's E3 press conference there were a lot of statements made. No DRM, no forced online, no this and no that – what they were saying was that they were listening to what consumers wanted. This part of the conference was drawn out and lasted quite a while (nothing wrong with that).
One aspect of the conference was quickly touched on and passed, that aspect was the monthly fee to play online multiplayer, access betas and other benefits. During an interview with CVG Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida explained what pushed them to make this decision.
Because the PS4 has so much going on with all of the share features, auto downloads and more to keep it free would have put a "natural pressure…to cut down on the cost to provide this free service." By cutting the costs of maintaining those features Sony wouldn't be attaining their goals with the PS4. So, in order to expand and evolve the services the console will provide they opted to charge $5 a month as an online fee.
The monthly payments would come out equal to the cost of an Xbox Gold Live membership and would be invested in maintaining the PS4. Yoshida went on to say:
"But to make the pain a little bit less we will continue to offer free content with instant game collections, discounts and early access to betas on PS4 as well. So at the beginning we typically picked from older games for the instant game collection on Vita and PS3, but because everything is new on PS4 we decided to make a smaller version of Drive Club with all the online features open, included in that instant game collection on day one.
In addition to that we add one digital game every month, so they get high quality indie games as well on top of what they get on PS3 and Vita. So hopefully that makes people's decision easy to join PS Plus."
How do you feel about Sony charging to play online? I'm rather ambivalent on the subject, but I'm already paying for an Xbox Live membership…So I'd just be swapping one for one.
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