Sony's gonna make them pay (the publishers that is)

ps3_prints_moneyBeen wondering why there’s so much more downloadable content for the Xbox 360 then the PS3? There’s been some news from game publishers today that back in October of 2008, Sony notified publishers that they would need to pay for the bandwidth that’s used when their content is downloaded. And this 16 cent per gigabyte fee is on top of the licensing fee that they have to pay to get their stuff published.

So let’s say you have an incredibly popular demo, like the Halo Wars download that’s currently on Xbox Live. If you’re a Sony publisher, you have to pay the licensing fee, and then for the downloads. Since the Halo Wars demo has been downloaded 2 million times, you’d now owe Sony $448,000. For a demo. And these fees go on until you remove your content from the Playstation Network store.

Sony has declined to comment on why the policy was put in effect, but I think we can guess.