"The main pillar for the PS4 will be online play. We're developing many new ways to play and connect which requires a large investment of resources," Yoshida said. "Considering the cost, to try to keep such a service free and consequently lower the quality would be absurd"

I guess the only absurd thing would be thinking that a greedy company would not try to force hand make you pay a tax to access third party servers they don't pay for.