This whole psn thing screams upper management.
Like, the whole company did stuff the way it would work best, everything was fine, until some assistant bloke somewhere answered a question from some super important walking suir honestly without thinking too much of it. Big mistake.
That upper management guy then noticed that what the company was doing didn’t “match their strategy paper for the current fiscal year (it did) and was presented to them differently (it wasn’t)”. He then had his staff fly into action in a wild outlook-driven frenzy, not listening to any counter by anyone, because “Mr. UpperManagemenGuy has instructed, so…”
In a blind effort to not draw the ire of Management, departments started bending and breaking stuff left and right so it would fit into managements fever dream of the “integrated customer”. A customer, who bought each and every PlayStation thing because mighty management forced an account onto them. Because that’s what’s really important to people.
Thats usually what happens in corporations, when we see this weird hotchpotch of almost panicked ad-hoc decisions and revisions on what was already decided and working.
i don’t get sony, even if people wouldnlt care to create a psn account. They just sell a game is less countries, means less money. What’s the benefit of it?
My hypothesis: They are preparing to compete with Steam, and to do so they need to have a compelling argument to make PC gamers consider their store instead of Steam. EPIC became relevant by giving free games for years; Sony will build an exclusives’ portfolio and then launch its own store. As this store will be available only where PSN already is, they probably don’t want to commit to keep the game working on these countries after migrating from Steam, so better to not sell now to avoid headaches later.
It’s a guess… with no real evidence to to it, but i wouldn’t say it’s impossible. The current interim CEO Hiroki Totoki has said they want to make more money on PC bringing more games to PC. Maybe he has bigger plans on that plattform. But only because you have a account on something doesn’t really mean you buy games on that plattform. Don’t know how much origin or ubisoft make money with their accounts, i’m sure it’s way more on steam?
Ah. An EEE move by Sony? Embrace (Steam), Extend (add PSN requirement), Extinguish (bye Steam).
I don’t think they can replace Steam, PC gamers trust Steam… a lot. But with the exclusives they can have an offer compelling enough to be real competition. Maybe offer the game on PC and their consoles for example (that would be neat).
They may not be prepared to do business in those countries, or modify their service to meet those countries’ legal requirements.
Of course they are not prepared, but then don’t add a requirement for a game if you now prepared.
More money in tracking people in rich countries and selling their data maybe?
I don’t think there is a real evidence to that at the moment. So far Sony is probably know for hmmm bad secrurity of data, but i don’t know about selling data.
I don’t think that the kind of data Sony (PSN) has enough value to be considered an asset.
