The last few months for Sony have not been pleasant, to say the least. Japan suffered an historic earthquake where people are still trying to just regain some semblance of life, and more recently, Sony has been the target of many attacks from hackers. With Playstation Network (PSN) having been down for over three weeks, Sony has also seen a barrage of legal entities demanding information on the attacks that lead to the compromise of millions of users' personal information. On top of that, some investment groups have downgraded Sony's stock from a "buy" status to a "hold" status. So what's this have to do with PSN? Possibly everything.

PSN is a service provided by Sony, free of charge. When originally announced, Sony enthusiasts rejoiced and it further fueled the already burning console war with Microsoft's Xbox and it's pay-to-play service of Xbox Live (XBL). PSN offered free mulitplayer and free services that Microsoft charged it's consumers. Sony aimed at gaining some market share back from Microsoft's XBox consumers with the dangling bait of free mulitplayer services, while Sony also became more appealing to consumers who had yet to purchase any console. Or at least a console with high-end graphics and gaming, no disrespect to Nintendo's Wii, but it's not really comparable to Xbox or PS3 in terms of the traditional gaming experience (...that's a topic for another day).

So Sony made a bold move pricing PSN a low, flat rate of...free. It even caused rumblings in the Xbox community. It had some Xbox consumers jumping ship to PS3, others claiming XBL was better because it's a paid service, and others questioned what XBL offered that PSN did not. Needless to say, Sony created a stir, and a high level of expectation for its PSN service. Many XBL consumers thought it would be XBL but free, and most PS3 enthusiasts were hopeful that it would be.

When PS3 released and PSN was put through it's strides, most of the PSN community were pleased. The PSN consumers who had never played on XBL were likely estatic since they had no frame of reference of what an online console gaming service could be like. Slowly the differences became apparent. Not because XBL was a paid service, and PSN was free, but because PSN was in its infant stages.

PSN went through its iterations and XBL went through its own. Each iteration saw them get closer in services provided, but XBL is more experienced with quite a few more years under its belt for research and development.

So what's this have to do with PSN and if it should be a paid service? Well, here's where opinion comes in.

After all the iterations of XBL and PSN, there is really only one glaring difference from a gaming services perspective, party chat or rather cross game chat. On XBL, parties of 8 or fewer people can doing anything on their console while collectively still chatting away with each other. One may be watching a movie or show, one could be watching ESPN, one could be playing a game, another last.fm, etc. You get the point. PSN, at this point, has yet to offer this functionality, but it would behoove them to implement such a feature as it only adds to the growing social aspect of gaming.

But other differences exist and some at the core of the console itself. PS3 offers a browser, that functions just like your browsers on you computers. While XBL packages widely used sites into a service, such as Facebook, last.fm, and ESPN. In that arena PS3 has far more capabilities than XBL in regards to online content accessible. This difference though seems marginal since most console gamers already have access to this content through their home computers. The only benefit Xbox has is an intergation with XBL, rather than just a browser, but it's a trivial difference at that.

So it seems that XBL and Sony offer similar services, why is one $60 a year and the other free?

As with any service, it's not free. It may say it's free, it may look free, but it cost someone. We, the consumers, might not be paying for it, but it has none-the-less been paid. A child that rakes a neighbor's yard, but doesn't charge them is free labor, but it was labor none-the-less. Same for any service offered as free. Unless it is run by fully automated robitics with no aspect of deteriotion, it is not free. When XBL was first was released, it cost $49.99 per year. Presumably that cost was used to manage the P2P connections as well as the growing development for multiplayer games and the infrastructure needed to support them. Microsoft gave the rest of the world the first price point for online console gaming costs for infrastructure and services offered.

Sony, however, saw fit to absorb all costs for the PSN service rather than charge it's consumer base. As to how they arrived at that decision, we will likely never know. It could appear Sony was trying to draw back consumers by putting PSN at a price that some consider predatory pricing. There is a strong case for predatory pricing as the difference in profits between PSN and XBL on subscriptions if well over a billion dollars in XBL's favor, since PSN doesn't have any profits from its users. Since PSN Plus is still a new product, I am purposefully ignoring it since little information is out on how many users it has and really what Sony gains out of it, since it offers free products in return.

XBL is a paid service and PSN is free. Why would anyone pay for XBL?

As a smart consumer, you should always know nothing is for free. There is always a reason something is offered for free. When Sony first announced PSN, they claimed they didn't want to charge consumers for what they already had access to. What they meant was, both XBL and PSN require the consumer to be using a broadband connection, which is already a paid service through their cable, phone, or another ISP company. The odd part of Sony's reason, is the fact they don't want to charge their customers what they already have access to. It's true, they do have access to the internet, but PSN is just an entity on the internet. There are many sites that charge access to view content. Sony's logic, while sounding like sweet melodies to consumers should also have raised their concerns.

PSN cost is absorbed by Sony, we've made that clear. But think beyond that fact. What does that affect? If PSN costs $500,000 a year to maintain (would venture to say that's on the light side, considering that would only pay for the salary for maybe five decent engineer salaries), then Sony has $500,000 less money for research and development, for marketing, for employee raises/bonuses, for re-investment into other projects, etc. It's not the fact that Sony loses money for PSN, it's the fact they lose it for other things as well.