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Improving the PlayStation Store
This opinion piece takes stock of Sony's PlayStation Store, examining its flaws and the areas Sony needs to improve as their gaming systems come to rely upon it more and more. The problems and suggested solutions involve everything from UI elements to demo availability to pricing inconsistencies.
"Some people may say that the Microsoft Points scheme is a little confusing, but it is consistent. If a game is 800MSP in the US, it's 800MSP everywhere else. What a MSP is worth is up to the store, but for the most part they're close. The PlayStation Store on the other hand can be all over the place. While most games in North America keep to the same price point — such as $9.99 or $14.99, converting that over to Europe is another thing entirely. For example, Flower came out earlier this year for $9.99USD. In Australia a $10USD game gets converted to $12.95AUD. Or does it? Bomberman Ultra just came out, and it's $15.95AUD. Heavy Weapon gets released for $12.95AUD, while Capcom’s previous efforts, like Commando 3, convert to $15.95. The same thing also happens for more expensive titles. Both Battlefield 1943 and Fat Princess were released for $14.99 in the US, but in Australia they're priced at $19.95AUD and $23.95 respectively."
This non-consistent pricing is not only in PlayStation Store - Steam prices also change heavily based on location. It's even worse with Steam, because the prices used to be same everywhere but they changed it in 2009 (nicely hidden as "local currencies come to steam!")
I haven't personally been able to buy anything from Store because for some reason any of my credit cards don't work with it, even though they work everywhere else. Apparently they finally got the cards to stores here now (it took them what, 2-3 years?), but I haven't bothered to go get any yet.
This is how the world works, there's little parity between the likes of the US and the UK let alone Oz. It's stupid to complain that another English version of the game has a different number next to the dollar sign signifying a different currency which in the real world runs circles around your own currency.
Cool! Australia apparently lies in Europe now!
Naturally
$1.00USD == £1.00GBP
These US Megacorps wouldn't have it anyother way...
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Is the author stupid? He really expects the PSP to match performance features of the PS3? THe reason the PS3 can background download is because it has multiple work units to process the data, including one dedicated solely to the OS. IM not THAT familiar with the PSP CPU architecture, even though i own one, but im pretty sure its a single core. Neither the Xbox 360 or PS3 supported background downloading at launch.
Good-bye
That paragraph quoted from the article is terribly worded and somewhat confusing. It continually lists things without telling the counterpart value or what the conversion is
1) Flower...gives us the US price, the US to AU conversion, but doesn't tell us the actual AU price
2) What is the US release price for Bomberman Ultra, Heavy Weapon, and Commando 3? I'm assuming it $9.99, but I can't say for sure
3) Battlefield 1942 and Fat Princess...great, we have their US and AU prices, but they didn't mention what the conversion is. Yes, we can calculate it from the previous 10->12.95 figure, but the reader shouldn't have to do that. From reading, I was under the impression that these 2 games were both overpriced, but then I did that conversion and I see a $15US game should be about $19.41AU, meaning that Battlefield 1943 was actually priced normally for the conversion (btw...they should have sold Battlefield 1943 for $19.43AU)
It is partially a US Company as its share are listed on the NYSE
http://www.google.co.uk/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:SNE
IMHO, that pretty well counts.
Also, the do have some significant LOCAL(to the US) subsidiaries espeically in the LA area.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I don't understand what all the fuzz is about, it has been this way for ages.
Take normal price for a ps3 game in USA, using Uncharted 2 as an example, would be $59.99 at ebgames.com, if you go to the danish store at ebgames.dk the same game is 549 danish kroners, converted to USD that would be around $110.
But like I said, it's been this way for ages.
MSP = Microsoft Points
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Almost all of the problems listed are either not problems, or are not Sony's problem. It is up to the game publisher to advertise, set prices, and make sure the customer is informed. I actually applaud Sony for not forcing them to do things like provide screenshots. If they don't want to provide them, they shouldn't have to.
And guess what? I'm free not to buy, either.
The only thing Sony does have control over is the format of the PSN Stores in each area... They are -way- different from each other (Japanese, too) and the US one is the only one that I think is laid out even close to right. The JP one doesn't even have a 'new games' section, but has 'promoted games' instead... Usually that includes the new ones, but not always... And almost never includes things like Themes. You have to actually explore the entire PSN each time you want to see what they have now.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Why can't I play my old PS1 games on my PSP without having to hack it! Have to agree that the PlayStation Store does need UI improvements but over all I like the whole idea - I have downloaded all the demos and even *gasp* brought a game - heaps better than having a UMD floating around.
But you aren't paying a different price for two games priced identically in the States. So a game that costs $X in the States will cost kX in another country (where k is the constantmultiplier MS applies to the cost of points). On the PS3, the cost in another country isn't predictable based on the price in the U.S. Like they said, two games that cost $10 in the states can cost two wildly different prices elsewhere.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
I've got to say the interface leaves a lot to be desired... it's quite flashy but not at all intuitive. I'd like something more table-based, where you can see the price, release date, genre etc. of lots of different games all at once. Instead, you often have to calculate where the content you want lives and hunt it down using the right combination of categories and button presses. Yeah, I know there is a search feature, but the browsing experience isn't great and is only going to get worse as more games are added.
If you think this is bad though, try Vidzone - the PS3 music video player you can download for free. It is slow, clunky and so horrible to use that I uninstalled it minutes after first using it. Worst interface I've ever seen, possibly apart from the Sonicstage NetMD software from 10 years ago or so (also by Sony). I think the company desperately needs to hire some usability experts...
Living in Canada, price differences are frequently apparent. Books for example list a Canadian price and a US price, which was fine when the Canadian dollar traded at 70 cents US. When the Canadian dollar shot up to parity, however, we were inexplicably still paying $15 for a $10 book. I'm not sure what the current book situation is though, it may have stabilized. Cars are another example, it's often cheaper to fly to the US to buy a car and then pay import taxes to drive it to Canada than it is to buy it here.
Online merchandise makes the inequalities more apparent because of the ease of comparing prices and the obvious lack of transport costs that could explain a difference but it's nothing new.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
the other problem with PS Store is that it is difficult to figure out what you are actually buying. Are you buying a game to play? a non-transferable licence to play the game? a licence restricted to a number of PS units? or perhaps a licence for 1 game per unit?
I had the misfortune of having a bluray drive fail and being out of warranty, I simply bought a new ps3 slim. Everything from the backup restored except 60 or so Singstar songs (GBP 50 /USD 80 ish) because, as I found out too late, the DRM in the singstar songs locks the songs for one PS3 unit and, even worse, you can't buy the songs again and re-download them because it thinks you already have them!
I try to avoid DRM for this very reason - but after a few pints one night, I never thought to check that Singstar would have such stupid DRM on it.
in the us tax is not part of the price in the uk and others places it is.
Let's imagine I want to buy a game on my XBox.
The game is 1200 Microsoft Points. I can't buy 1200 Microsoft Points, though. I can buy 2000. But then I have 800 Microsoft Points left over. I don't want that, so I navigate through the menu structure to buy 1000 Microsoft Points (wait for confirmation), then again to buy another 250 Microsoft Points (wait for confirmation). Now I can buy the game (wait for confirmation) and start downloading. Oh, look at this, here is another game I want, I didn't see this before. It is 400 Microsoft Points. I have 50. I go to buy another 500 Microsoft Points (wait for confirmation) and then buy the game (wait for confirmation). Now I've got 150 Microsoft Points, and next time I buy a game I get to go through the dance again, trying to figure out the set of "Microsoft Point" purchases that minimizes my missing money. Thanks Microsoft. Always a pleasure.
Let's imagine I want to buy a game on my PS3.
I find the game. It's $14.99. I choose "buy" (wait for confirmation). I start downloading. Oh, look at this, here is another game I want, I didn't see this before. It's $4.99. I choose "buy". Sony informs me that the minimum credit card charge is $10.00, so I'll have $5.01 left over, but that will automatically be stored and used on the next game. Okay, accept (wait for confirmation). Now I have $5.01 stored on the Sony servers, and my next game - or set of games, since I can buy a bunch of games together - will just be cheaper.
Take a wild guess as to which of these I prefer.
(I'm not going to go into the Wii method because . . . well, there's a reason I've only bought one game ever on the Wii.)
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
My only gripe doesn't have to do with the currencies but the fact that all the psp stuff is mixed in with the ps3. I get that sony wants me to buy a psp but bugging me all the time with all the damn psp stuff is a turn off.
what sony REALLY needs to do is emulate the psp on the ps3 so you can play your games on the ps3 or the psp. I'd actually buy one then and there are several psp games i'd buy just to play on the ps3. (loco roco, papaton, mgs, gow, assassin's creed, etc)
It's the same way with physical goods too. They're pricing to what they think the regional markets will bare. And I'm sure they've done a fair amount of market research to determine those variations.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Generally people think there should be some sort of parity of pricing across countries for online distribution systems but this is wrong in the real world for a few reasons. Fundamentally you could break it down to intentional and mechanical.
On the intentional side, this is pretty obvious. Companies exploit the strength of local economies by pricing goods per market. They also have to deal with weak markets. Usually you get some guff about "additional operating costs" but while that's partially true it's mostly intentional price setting. We all know that Good X is cheaper in country Y than your home country Z story. I'm surprised people think companies wouldn't do it to an online distribution system too and expect parity. The nice thing for us as consumers is we can spot it. Look at the effective USD cost in Swiss Francs in that table there - ouch.
Secondly, mechanical. Managing currency exposure is fairly complicated for most businesses and many of them do a not very good job at it. Certainly Steam is woeful at it. FX markets move very very very fast and the nature of the forward contracts you have to purchase to hedge foreign currency exposures also complicates things *a lot* for non expert businesses. If I have most of my earnings in dollars and I'm selling products in Euro, I don't simply convert Euros back to dollars each business day and not mind what is happening to the EUR / USD exchange rate. If the exchange rate keeps on collapsing against me, I would be getting less and less dollars every day. You don't want your non-dollar goods giving you 20% less than you expected at the beginning of the year because of a 20% decline in the exchange rate.
What I should do is hedge my expected earnings in EUR with, say, a three month FX forward contract so that for every dollar I "lose" when the EUR / USD exchange rate falls against my dollar interests, I make a dollar in profit when the FX forward contract expires three months from now. So even if the exchange rate goes against me by 10%, while the USD40 I thought I would make a month from now on the euro sale of a single copy of my game actually becomes USD36 due to adverse currency movements, then I would get back the 4 dollars from the profit on the foreign exchange rate forward. Airlines do the equivalent hedging fuel exposures.
Banks do this all the time and decent currency management would solve a lot of these problems. Games businesses just don't get it right mechanically with decent hedging and frequently it's plain old intentional price differentials too.
The Playstation store is the one area where the PS3 falls far short of the XBox 360, but the article misses the major issues. When I look for things in the PS3 store, it is just a jumble, and there is no really useful sorting. I often end up downloading a game for XBox 360 that I might have downloaded for PS3 if the store were not so disorganized. For example, on the XBox360, all games available online have demos, and the full game can be purchased from the demo. On the PS3 demos are separate things, and there is no differentiation between demos for disk games and demos for online available games. What the PS3 store really needs is:
A way to sort games into categories.
-Demos of PS3 games available on disks (subsorted by name, release date, genre, or popularity)
-Demos of *all* PS3 games available online with option to buy full game (subsorted by name, release date, genre, or popularity)
-PSP games (subsorted by name, release date, genre, or popularity)
I mean no one goes to the grocery store and goes "This is horrible problem...the oatmeal is way to cheap compared to Frosted Flakes. These prices are all over the place!"
I'm all for vendors being free to price their product in online venues at what ever level they want. This also means they can price they are free to price themselves into oblivion but the wonderful things about online stores it is much easier to fix than if they made the wrong price level for on the shelf product. This "problem" really doesn't seem like a problem at all.
differences, News at 11.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I did "buy" a few things from the PlayStation store, because they were games priced at $4.99 in a special offer. That's a reasonable price for an indefinite rental.
$30+ on a game I can't resell when I'm done with it? Oh, hell no.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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I could care less what the price of a game is on the other side of the world. Why would I even take the time to compare? If the price in my country is fair to me, I will buy it.
The biggest problem is that the games cannot be resold, and yet they are priced as if they could be resold. A $10-15 downloadable game is usually a cute diversion, lacking in substance and soon forgotten. And yet, that same $10-15 could be the net cost of buying a full retail game, playing it, and then selling it.
Some of the downloadable games are nothing more than glorified versions of the Flash games I can play online for free. How about a price of $2 - $5?
I don't care how much games cost in Japan or Australia or in Latvia. I care how much games cost HERE. MS Points are just vendor lock in. If a game comes out on PSN, I can buy the whole game with out buying "points" leaving me with extra leaving me to buy more points to buy another product on PSN thus leaving me to buy more points and keeping this unholy cycle going. This is, of course, for amounts greater than five bucks, but, there isn't much on the PSN store aside from DLC unlockables that cost that little.
if Sony wants to improve PSN, put out more crap on PSN. PSN is easier to search than the XBLA Marketplace and a whole lot more friendly when it comes to using *real* currency.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Add having to install demos to the list. I've had a 360 for years and recently picked up a PS3. I downloaded a demo and then had to install it!? The install took about 10 minutes for a 1.2 GB demo.
Really Sony?
With the 360 you just download and play. There is no addition anything to be done.
Forcing your customer to walk away from the machine, as it's completely unusable during install, is a bad idea. They may find something better to do with their time.
I find being offended by me offensive.
As the AC already pointed out, Sony isn't a US corporation. Also, Canon does the same thing. In the US, the 5D Mark II lists for $2699USD, and in the UK it lists for £2690GBP.
If we're going to be jumping to random conclusions based on little to no data (after all, this is /.), these two data points should be enough to conclude that Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions. Actually, to be more precise, customers of Japanese corporations have trouble doing currency conversions, otherwise they would know they are being ripped off.
But in reality, these are just two data points and the more likely scenario is that these two companies (among others, I'm sure) have just found another way to screw over some of their customers.
... or something anyway. Browser on mine does youtube fine.
Also BBC iPlayer works nicely (I'm in the UK), and if you have a linux box you can install mediatomb and have the PS3 pick it up as a media server. It plays pretty much anything. It's great :)
YMMV of course. And from your post it seems it has.
Supply is essentially infinite everywhere. The only thing that matters is demand vs price.
Several times I've come close to buying PSP games, because they're not so clearly marked - and once I actually screwed up and did it. I now own $14.99 worth of software I don't even own the hardware to play.
Would be really nice if I could have a "Just turn off all the PSP content, ok?" setting.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.