Sony’s social media team is having a rough week: everything they post is being piled up by angry gamers who are outraged by Sony’s plans to stop the production of game discs.
Many PlayStation owners vow to boycott the PlayStation Store, cancel their PlayStation Plus membership and never buy PlayStation products again.
It’s sure to be a PR nightmare, with virtually all online PlayStation content becoming a place for players to protest, derailing any attempt to talk about anything else.
It reminds me of the response to Sonos’ introduction of a new and hugely flawed app, which Sonos now admits was poorly executed.
Sonos’ PR nightmare lasted about 18 months, there’s now optimism and renewed confidence about the new changes it’s bringing to improve the app. Could Sony learn from Sonos’ experience and its attempts to rebuild customer trust?
I think the answer is: yes it could, but no it won’t.
What Sonos got right and Sony probably won’t
Speaking to TechRadar earlier this year, Sonos CEO Tom Conrad laid out his views on how to try to make angry customers happy again. “You just have to show up in people’s lives with some humility and do the hard work of winning back their trust through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you’ve put people through.”
So far, Sony isn’t: Instead of responding to gamers’ concerns, it’s battening down the hatches and remaining silent on its digital-only move. And that’s a shame, because there are genuine reasons for gamers to worry about Sony’s decision.
There are three main concerns with digital only. The first, and I think the most important, is cost. The PlayStation Store is ridiculously expensive: e.g Spider-Man 2a three year old game, is £69.99 digitally today in the UK where I’m based. Competition between retailers means it’s around £37 over the counter.
The second is used games. I buy a lot of games used, and a lot of players like to sell their games after they’ve completed them or become annoyed with them so they can spend the money they make back on more new games (a win for the industry overall). So I can buy Return for around £20 on eBay. I can’t buy the digital edition second hand so if I want the digital version it’s… you guessed it £69.99.
To be fair, you can get both games and others on PlayStation Plus Extra. But not everyone wants or can sustain another subscription, and we know that all subscription services go up in price – often dramatically, as we saw with Xbox Game Pass last year.
And the third is ownership. Sony’s disc announcement came days after it deleted customer’s bought copies of over 500 films, making it clear that purchase does not mean ownership forever. And those movies cost a lot less than £69.99.
Sony may have to eat humble pie for a while to emulate Sonos here, seek out customer input to talk about these concerns and maybe think about how to address them – so it could, for example, tell us that digital codes will still be sold through multiple retailers, as Nintendo does with its keycards, or that we’d be able to resell our digital-only games (although the mechanism for this is still being worked out).
The reality, however, is that for a company the size of Sony, even a significant backlash from customers such as 246,586 signatures on a petition represents a microscopic proportion of its 125 million PlayStation Plus subscribers, let alone the many more PlayStation owners – and it can afford to ignore them.
It’s quite a gamble. Just ask Microsoft, whose Game Pass price increase scared away far more customers than expected — according to reports, it lost 4 million out of 34 million Game Pass subscribers when it expected huge growth instead, forcing a partial turnaround.
But Sony’s gaming business is far bigger, and that means it can still upset a lot of customers without feeling much pain.
I suspect Sony will take another lesson from the Sonos situation: even at the height of customer anger, Sonos still sold plenty of speakers, soundbars and subs.
Then again, maybe Sony is more rattled than it’s currently letting on. Two days after the digital-only announcement, with customers raging online, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki sold more than half of his Sony shares, and Sony’s chief strategy officer also unloaded a lot of Sony stock.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds.
