In a rather unsavory turn of their business model (that they’ve been following up until the 1st of October last year), Sony has now decided to charge game companies $0.16 per gigabyte of bandwidth. Until the change last October, Sony matched the model for DLC that Microsoft was using…the one that cost developers nothing for downloads.

Take for example a game demo that weighs in at an exact 1GB. For each 1 million downloads, that is an additional $160,000 that the company would have to budget. If you looked at how many times the Resident Evil 5 demo has been downloaded on the Xbox 360, which doesn’t charge for bandwidth, you’d bee looking at nearly $800,000 that Capcom would lose on people just trying a game out.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. According to a story from MTV Multiplayer, the 16 cents per GB pertains to content that is supplied through the PlayStation Network which in the case of free content only applies during the product’s first 60 days on the PSN. Paid content, however, is charged the same until the company decides to remove their wares.

Sony has offered no word about why they implemented the new charges, instead offered a perfectly trite sounding quote from SCEA chairman Patrick Seybold when asked to comment: “(We) appreciate the opportunity to jump in here, but we respect the confidentiality of our business agreements with our publishing partners.”

I guess as long as the companies are the ones being asked and are willing to foot the bill, we really shouldn’t complain. Much. I only wonder how many companies will continue to use the PSN to host their content as if nothing has changed.