John-ShepardLast week, it became clear that Sony was intending to unveil some sort of premium subscription service for the PSN, although it had yet to be confirmed by any Sony executive.
Well, Sony boss Kaz Hirai has indeed confirmed their plans to introduce a premium online service of some kind, as reported by GameSpot . This new "premium level" will be added to the current PSP and PS3 Network service and no , this won't have any impact on Sony's continued "free to play" theory. If you wish to play games online, it still won't cost you a dime. However, with the huge amount of content scheduled for the PSN, including everything from movies to music albums to virtual books, it almost seemed inevitable that Sony would provide consumers with an upper-level subscription option. We've also learned that PSN revenue is definitely spiking; Sony expects to rake in $563 million from the ever-expanding service this fiscal year, which would be three times what the Network made them in fiscal 2008. Then you can toss Netflix and the continued Home improvements onto the pile, and you've got a definite cash cow possibility, here. It'll be interesting to see how many people purchase whatever this new premium subscription will be, though…
We'll be sure to bring you all the details of this special PSN package when it becomes available; we expect Sony to release this information some time around the end of the year.
