Sony wants to provide as many services as possible for free
Plans on making extra revenue from them and not charge customers
The president of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, has said the company is keen to provide as many free services as possible to PSP, as well as PS3, by using advertising to fund them.
Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Yoshida-san said: "We like to provide as many services as possible for free - we already provide our network access for gameplay for free - and the interesting thing about the network side and the internet business is that there's a variety of revenue sources. Not necessarily getting people to pay, but with advertising and so on.
"Those are things we're looking at, and learning how we can provide a service without people having to pay," he continued, "but we still get our operation running with funding from somewhere so that we can maintain the level of quality we want."
Sony announced at the recent Leipzig Games Convention its free music streaming deal with VidZone - a service that will be available from early 2009 and allow users to stream music to their PS3s, create playlists and port them to PSP.
Speaking about the deal, Yoshida-san commented: "We're more open about approaching and bringing services in to PS3 and PSP. We can't support all the needs of the consumer and there are great companies providing services on the PC already - so we're very open to provide the opportunity to those companies to reach our user base as well."
Sony's decision to introduce a series of add-ons and services to PSP has come under some criticism - from those who'd rather have more games than GPS, a TV service and music streaming. But what do you think? Would you welcome even more free multi-media services for PSP? Let us know.
