Playstation Stars to Give Members Customer Support Priority
The newly announced ‘Playstation Stars’ was unveiled to be a way for fans of Playstation to demonstrate their love for different Sony IPs. You can earn collectible figures by earning trophies and buying games from the Playstation Store. You can also earn ‘points’, which are essentially the same as Nintendo’s ‘gold points’, although it remains to be seen how many points you’ll get for what. The company also recently announced the following ‘tiers’, which are unlocked based on how much time, effort, and (most importantly) money you invest in:
While everything here seems quite basic and not too controversial, the issues arise when we look at the fourth tier. To unlock the perks of this final tier, you must earn 128 uncommon trophies from playing a variety of games, as well as purchasing four full games from the Playstation store. While this wouldn’t seem so bad if it was only minor unlockables that were being blocked off, the other benefit of this tier rears its head: chat priority routing. This essentially gives anyone who gets to this highest tier priority customer service for anything Playstation-related. For something that is supposed to be for superfans of Playstation’s game library, it doesn’t make too much sense to lock out such a basic feature behind a convoluted paywall.
On the other hand, this is also quite an odd inclusion for those who do actually reach this tier. The final reward for being a Playstation megafan turns out to be… faster technical support if something goes wrong. It’s not exactly something anybody will be clamoring for. It also brings out the discussion that those who don’t opt into this service will be indirectly punished by worse customer service as a result. This is obviously not desirable, and it remains to be seen whether or not regular services will be disrupted as a result of this, but we can already conclude that fans are not happy. This can be seen when news broke in Asia (where the service has initially launched ahead of Western markets) - with tweets being sent out announcing their dissatisfaction with Sony’s approach here. Here’s one tweet from user @akutarosu:
All in all, this bizarre inclusion will likely only serve to damage the very fresh Playstation Stars brand. The locking away of such a basic feature will turn more people away than attract, but what I find so surprising is that Sony didn’t seem to see this coming. Earlier this year, there was some discontent with how free trials of big-budget games such as Horizon: Forbidden West were locked behind a £13.49 per month paywall with Playstation Plus Premium. From that misstep to this even greater transgression, a larger amount of gamers are getting more frustrated with Sony’s business practices. It remains to be seen whether this will be amended, or if Playstation will double down on their customer service changes. We’ll have to see when Playstation: Stars officially launches in western markets within the next few weeks.
