Suggestion: How To Make The PSN Better In 10 Easy Steps
Yesterday the rumor mill finally got around to telling me that PS3 owners should be expecting to see cross-game voice chat sometime in the near future. While my first response to hearing this ran along the lines of "this is years too late for me to care," but upon further introspection I wondered to myself, "what is the deal with Sony and the PlayStation Network?" It's been fairly obvious that Sony has been playing a difficult game of catch up with Microsoft since the service's launch day, but not much has changed today as we quickly approach the console monolith's third birthday. The PSN still lacks some obvious, and not-so-obvious, features that the competition is more than willing to offer players.
It looks like I'm not the only person that has been thinking about this lately as Gamasutra's Ryan Langley has constructed his own list of "10 Ways To Improve The PlayStation Network." Before moving forward, Sony diehards are best warned: the list will either make you green with envy or red with illogical rage. The most significant issues keeping Sony's online bazaar from being the best it can be is covered here and that includes big topics of conversations (like the lack of screenshots of videos for games) to smaller nitpicks that offend the eye (Europe, I never knew you had it so bad!).
The issue I find plaguing the service the most is what Langley calls "The Separation of Games and Territories"...
With a single worldwide Xbox Live Arcade release, publishers can concentrate on a single campaign. They can build hype, have competitions and release trailers or screenshots in a timely manner. If a game has a staggered release, the hype dissipates, and causes potentially disgruntled would-be customers to care less and less about a game.Take Trine for example. The game came out in Europe two weeks ago, after two months of being out on the PC. The game will finally hit the U.S at the end of October. But by the time is comes out, people will be already be over the peak of interest, publisher Nobilis may have exhausted all of their press budget, and any sort of post-release buzz from other territories will be gone. That's a terrible way to run a business.
In this day and age, the internet moves quick and gamers tear through games even faster. It doesn't make sense that a game like Trine can be released in Europe, with a full English/Spanish/French localization attached, yet we have to wait months after its release for the chance to play it. If I had to take a totally uneducated guess, my gut feeling that Sony Computer Entertainment of America found a bug or two in their build of the game that slid by Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe and we got a delayed release as a reasult. Sounds kind of silly to me if it's the same content on the same machines, but I don't run Sony so what would I know.
The best thing about Langley's list is that most of the items discussed are ones that are relatively simple to implement, but would go a long way to make the player's experience using the PSN much smoother. Do any of you dear readers have any suggestions of your own?
[Opinion: 10 Ways To Improve The PlayStation Network] Gamasutra
Game-Boy
Posted to Video Games on 15 October 2009
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: 10 easy steps, gamasutra, psn, sony, suggestion, why I hate playing online
Some of these are genuine problems... some of these quite frankly are just nit picking. Inconsistent conversion rates? Please. It is more likely people will see the price for one region on the Internet and not know which region it is referring to rather than be confused because they tried to do a conversion rate on a foreign price. Icons, icons, icons. This could have been one complaint, easily. A top 5 would have been much less painful to read.
I agree that the submission process contributing to different release dates in different regions is a potential sweet spot for improvement. The question is, do XBox developers really agree this approach doesn't cause bottle necks in some other way? I would not be surprised if Microsoft just has more staff allocated to streamline this process in general. Sony still seems kind garage-kit with respect to PSN availability and connection quality, low staffing numbers compared to XBox would not surprise me.
I can't be the only one feeling that PSN's video service is over priced, at least in the US. I completely agree with that the lack of game play footage and screen-shots is a problem. I end up having to go online to look into some games. Wii was very weak in this respect too until the Nintendo Channel took off with more content. Now PSN is the one catching all the tailwind at least shopping experience wise. PSN's HTML interface is the least of my concerns. They have a blog with an RSS feed, good enough. I would much rather see Sony focus on the quality of experience from the native platforms first.
@Borndigital
I live in the UK and can tell you that the price conversion really IS a huge problem.
Paying £15 for a game that everyone else in the US can get for £10 equivalent in USD is NOT nit picking...
Sadly this does not only apply to PSN games... its retail games as well.
Lets take Uncharted 2 as a newly released example, and lets use Amazon as a comparison.
$59.99 on US amazon(RRP)- £49.99 on UK amazon (RRP), which is equivalent to roughly $80 USD
WHY?
You also mentioned that the video store is over priced.
The UK and rest of Europe though still do not even have the video store...
@ Cerberus
as a fellow UK citizen, I reckon it's unfair to pin the price disparity solely on Sony, as this applies not just to the PS3 but all formats (I'm guessing the Xbox too - do 800 mspoints cost the same in the UK and US or is their a price difference?). To slap that as a 'fault' with the PSN seems more than a tad unfair to me.
I agree most of them are nitpicks, especially the three seperate listing of icons - and yeah, the lack of a video store kind of bugs me, but not enormously. I mean, we have the BBC iPlayer which the rest of the world doesn't. I personally see it as swings and roundabouts.
I'm not saying the PSN is perfect, it isn't. But I do think most of these 'issues' are being blown out of all proportion or mis-attributed. And not having a specific demos area? They really were grasping at straws to make the list a full ten strong, imo.
I wasn't specifically blaming sony. Its usually the developers that set the prices anyway... but Sony does have a little persausive power at their disposal that they could use.
The iPlayer thing is only an internet short cut, not a program. People in other countries can easily access it from the PS3 browser (which I did before the shortcut was there). So thats a bit of a moot point.
The demo thing I think is also valid. Yes, it seems a bit like nit picking since its arguing about the appearence of a single button/category... but having that category would make the store easier to navigate.
Better navigation could possibly mean better sales. There are many other examples of how the store could be changed for the better but I think this is the main one.
Lumping demos with full games is counter productive unless you can instantly tell at a glance which is which, what is free and what isn't free etc.
Unless I frequently check the "Latest" section every week, many things are missed entirely that I might have otherwise downloaded/played/bought.
What IS nit picking, is the preview thing. Pictures... while useful to some, aren't strictly necessary. The description alone usually gives me enough of an idea of whether its my sort of game or not... and if that isn't enough there will usually be a demo
.... If you can manage to find the demo that is...
Wow. And I thought Nintendo was bad for screwing Europe over.
As for these such related issues, what the games industry as a whole needs to do is this:
- Translate only to [European] English for Europe [most gamers over here speak and know it anyway, why waste time and money thus with another 5 languages?] It only hurts your game sales in the end [I won't be picking up ToS2 on the Wii now for example because it came out last year in the Americas, but has taken a YEAR to come out here for some reason].
- Dump Point Systems & Cards. Either add more Credit Card options and or include Paypal as an option.
Frankly, I think what they need to do is what Xbox Live does: Require demos for all download titles. I notice that almost no games on PSN offer demo versions. There are a lot of games on the PSN that look interesting, but if I can't try before I buy, I'm not risking getting burned, especially since download titles are non-refundable.
@ Cerberus
I don't disagree that charging more for content in different regions is rude. I'm not a fan of region locking/control in general. My stance was that I don't feel like the _confusion_ over the conversion rates is that huge an issue compared to the other areas of improvement. I have noticed a lot of blogs wrestling with this, they mention one price and have to update the post because they read/guessed wrong. Clearly it is a problem, I just don't think it is a sweet spot business plan wise. Conversion rates change constantly so they are going to either do a point system, or price arbitrarily. They could certainly try to set their arbitrary prices more fairly, but they are probably setting prices based on profit projections, not roughly equal prices across regions.
There is unhappiness on all sides of the fence. There is content even we in the US don't have or get after everyone else. That is certainly not the most common case however. Boo Regions. To an extent I can see how content wise regions might be necessary, because of different laws and rating systems. Aside from that, it is all a money game.