IGN:
Dear Sony: Please Fix the PlayStation Store
And keep us in the loop while you do.
April 17, 2013
by Colin Moriarty
The PlayStation Network has gotten a bad rap from many corners of the gaming realm. Some of the criticism is well-deserved – after all, the PSN did get knocked offline for three weeks in 2011 -- but other criticism, not so much. The CrossMediaBar (XMB) isn’t nearly as difficult to navigate as people say, the online gaming experience is mostly indistinguishable from PlayStation’s rival on a game-to-game basis, and party chat really isn’t the be-all, end-all of the online gaming world.
But for all of that, the PlayStation Network experience is mired with and bogged down by incessant maintenance periods, slow download speeds and a litany of never-ending firmware updates. If you use PlayStation 3 (or PlayStation Vita) regularly, you’ve gotten used to this. It’s the PlayStation ecosystem’s very own Stockholm Syndrome between the company and its consumers. We just deal with everything and sometimes even make excuses for any encountered issue (PlayStation Network is free!).
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It’s the PlayStation ecosystem’s very own Stockholm Syndrome...
What you might not have gotten used to, however, is the PlayStation Store, specifically the new iteration that was designed to fix all of the problems of the old version, but is somehow exponentially worse in almost every respect. And you very well might never get used to the fact that – for six years running -- Sony can’t update the PlayStation Store at a consistent time. Ever.
When you combine the subpar nature of the new PlayStation Store with the PlayStation Network’s well-known series of deficiencies and the company’s seeming inability to fix the issues at hand for a period of time approaching seven years, you have a serious problem. Compounding this is Sony’s inability to communicate well with its consumers, which is strange, because Sony depends on those consumers to sustain their enterprise, and the patience of those consumers – which was heavily stressed back in 2011 -- is starting to bend significantly once again.
Sony declined to comment for this story.
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...Sony can’t update the PlayStation Store at a consistent time. Ever.
The original PlayStation Store running on PlayStation 3 was browser-based, and its replacement, while not perfect, was definitely a step in the right direction. It lacked coherent game discovery tools and certainly represented a storefront more archaic than its competitors’, but it generally worked. The new PlayStation Store, on the other hand, doesn’t work well. It hangs constantly, freezes on occasion, and can even crash your console. Its search tools are slow and cumbersome. It’s somehow harder to navigate than the storefront it replaced.
From the second the new Store rolled-out – which, as you may remember, was itself delayed in North America due to unknown technical reasons – very little about it engendered confidence in Sony’s most hardcore userbase, the players who practically live their lives on PlayStation Network and spend endless amounts of money buying content. And since the actual Store now requires patches and updates, just like games, another layer of frustration is caked upon the Store’s already poorly-functioning foundation. I would love to see the number of people who have walked away from potential purchases because the Store prompted them with yet another mandatory update upon start-up.
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...the PlayStation Store literally never updates on a strict schedule.
But even if it takes you a few tries, muttered curse words and just a little more patience than should be necessary, we can still gain access to the games we want to pay for and download. Except for when we can’t. That’s because the PlayStation Store literally never updates on a strict schedule. It is a running joke with PlayStation gamers; all you have to do to verify that for yourself is read the inundation on various PlayStation Blog Store-related posts. While Microsoft updates its own store at the same time every single week, PlayStation gamers are left wondering when they’ll get new goods to buy, and sometimes – as was the case this week – they start to wonder if they’ll get new goods to buy.
Sometimes, the PlayStation Store will update at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Sometimes, 5 p.m. Sometimes, 7:30 p.m. Sometimes, midnight. Sometimes, the Store will update but voucher codes won’t work. Sometimes, new items are on the Store, but you can only find them if you search. Sometimes, games that no one ever mentioned once magically appear on the Store. Sometimes, games that were supposed to appear don’t arrive.
And sometimes, like yesterday, the PlayStation Store doesn’t update at all, and no one from Sony has a word to say about it. Except for the occasional Tweet:
Two updates, 14 hours apart.
Note that the company never posted on its Facebook (where it has nearly 32 million likes), sent PSN messages to players, e-mailed its users (of which it claimed 77 million back in 2011), or even reached out to gaming outlets like IGN so that it can relay word on what went wrong and when it will be fixed. It didn’t even post on the PlayStation Blog (as of writing this article), its official pro-Sony outlet that, for what it’s worth, gets exceptional traffic.
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It is a running joke with PlayStation gamers...
To the consumer, this kind of treatment is unfair. But look at it from another angle. Remove yourself, as the purchaser, from the equation for a second. Imagine how a developer must feel. Five games were set to be uploaded during this update for PS3 and PS Vita. Not only does the consumer lose here, so too does the developer who is counting on those early sales to buoy their (sometimes significant) investment. And this is perhaps the most ironic point of all, because Sony, more than its competitors, seems to understand the importance of having developers of all sizes and scopes on their service. They foster great relationships that get them more exclusives than their competitors. It’s all so strange. It just doesn’t add up, it doesn’t make sense.
Hell, Sony gets so much right that it makes puzzling issues with the PlayStation Store all the more confounding and confusing. This is the company that made its online service completely free while its competitor charges $60 to play games online and watch Netflix. This is the company that charges a meager $50 a year for access to dozens of free games, scores of discounted games and DLC, cloud saving and more. This is the company that invests in games for gamers, that made a handheld for the hardcore, that sustains a 12-studio roster of exclusive studios, and that has an exceptionally exciting new console on the horizon that will likely eradicate these (and other) issues. All of this while the larger parent company is in the red, mind you.
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How hard can it be to be forward facing, consumer first and consistent?
But we’re not in the PlayStation 4 era yet. Millions of us still use our PlayStation 3 on a daily basis, and will continue to even when the PS4 launches. And ignoring these issues, pretending like there’s nothing wrong with not updating the Store on a consistent basis and not communicating constantly with your most cherished consumers simply isn’t acceptable. The people who wait for the Store to update are the same people who support PS Vita, who buy dozens of games a year, who evangelize the PlayStation brand. They deserve better than a situation where the only consistency is inconsistency.
How hard can it be to send a few Tweets out to allay the fears of your customers or to conjure up a PlayStation Blog post apologizing for the delays and explaining the causes for them in-depth to the users? How hard can it be to be forward-facing, consumer-first and consistent?
I’m not the only Platinum Trophy-chasing, Vita-loving, PS3-embedded gamer in the world. There are millions of us. So toil away and fix the problems, Sony, but talk to us while you do.
Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.
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