So I did a thread about Microsoft and why I wouldn't buy an Xbox, so I do currently have a PS5, but I think it only fair to go into Sony and Playstation.
I should state first and foremost I do like Sony Products, generally speaking I think they go after engineering excellence.
Customer Service
They have and still do absolutely suck at this. PSN should offer refunds as standard, they can release time limited trials - they can keep track of time played on any game - the digital store should offer a no quibble refund policy. They really need to rethink how they handle customer service. Sure there will be a few that will try and abuse the system, but really you want your customers to feel like first class citizens for buying into your eco-system.
It should be fairly trivial for them to implement a solid refund service, if they believe in their products then this should be a no-brainer to implement. Give customers the ability to cancel pre-orders and to refund a game which is just bad within 48 hours or 2 - 3 hours game play.
I think it must be a Japanese cultural thing, but I think Sony as a whole underestimates how important customer service is. I personally will pay more for a product to buy from a company I know has excellent customer service, its the peace of mind you get with a product. The reason Amazon has been so successful is exactly because of customer service. Apple used to have amazing customer service, less so now (once upon a time my sister took back an ipod 3 years past warranty and they replaced it free of charge for her - I mean stuff like this is what keeps people buying and trusting products from a company)
Cost of Games
I am sorry $70, £70, 70 euros however you cut it, its just too much. I actually live in the UK, in the ps4 gen I think I paid about £40.
I still do not understand why a digital game costs more than a physical game. The digital store fronts artificially inflate the game prices with very very little overheard - the only cost for the game is the cost of storing it and transmitting it (customer downloading) both of which are negligible compared to printing & shipping of physical games. Digital store fronts should always be cheaper not more expensive than physical store fronts. The excuse about cost of game development increasing - I just do not buy. It is greedy and short sighted. I have to say this generation I am only buying games when they go on sale - I bought 2 or 3 (returnal, Spiderman MM) on release (even then I used sites which allowed me to buy gift cards I think I got a £100 gift card for £80 on shopto and another £50 for £40) - I refused to buy more and while I think Returnal is / has been my favourite game it was not worth £70 I love House Marque games. Artificially inflating all games costs to £70 just means customers will have to be more discerning with what they buy. I am not poor by any means my income is decent, but I don't just throw money away, for that reason I am reticent to buy any games at release I don't think this gen I will buy any other games at 70.
Marketing
They really suck at this, their xperia phone division had this "wow of now" marketing scheme which was just awful. They tend to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to actually producing products. I mean look at the Sony Viao Z ultrabook:
. Macbook Air was essentially a copy of what Sony was doing. They really do strive for engineering excellence, but are awful at selling their products. The only good marketing campaign that I can remember was the ps3 Kevin Butler ads, most of the initial ps3 adverts were just whacky and awful.
Playstation Games on PC
Being a platform holder is far more beneficial and valuable than just being a publisher. Publishers are currently being bought out by platform holders. Platform holders take a 30% cut on everything sold through their platform. Taking your most valuable component (the games) and acting like a publisher for another Massive platform holder to take a big cut - I really struggle to see the financial benefit here. If this ends up in the long term devaluing your platform then it is a massive misstep. Ultimately the knock on effects are not going to be seen now, but they will be seen by the next generation. Also why port to directX, they should be porting their engines and games to Vulkan if this is the route they wish to go down an open spec api which I think Sony should be embracing on all of its platforms, being tied down to an api completely owned and controlled by your competitor makes absolutely no sense. This is something they really need to think through.
Now this is just me speaking, but I think Sony could have been as big as Apple is now. They ventured into the media (Music and Films) but not into software, they have built a few pieces of software I believe they have some movie editing software some other bits and pieces, essentially with a solid software engineering team they could have begun to tie in all of their various and diverse systems into an ever evolving eco system like Apple. Their tv division is now using Android TV / Google Tv (which I really don't like) They had this cross media bar interface running on Linux before which was so fast and smooth instead they dumped it for the ever spying, ever in your face, really slow and clunky android tv. Their phones run Android, The playstation runs a custom version of FreeBSD, their laptops ran windows etc. Personally I think they should have taken something like Linux and started developing their own ui on top of it and then used this as the core to build everything else on, but built open standards something that would allow other manufacturers to also interoperate with great support and marketing this would be killer, it would be much like how Apple took *BSD / Mach Kernel and built their own ui on top - All apple products use this core (Unix & Linux are extremely flexible it can run on practically anything - Samsung uses Linux on their fridges, on their tvs, on their Washing Machines, they do use Android on their phones but everything else is fully under their control (They all run a version of tizen - why has Sony not done this ?? )).
This would all seem counter to a lot of my actual beliefs about open standards and open source, however I believe the 2 can co-exist. Many massive companies have already seen that co-operating and building open source cross platform standards actually lends itself to building better products it removes the entire engineering efforts from your own shoulders and allows those that are technically competent to jump in and build out that standard and it allows other companies to also contribute which ends up building a better product. I think Sony should still go down this route, I think being completely dependant on a closed source vendor for any component is a terrible idea. If they truly want to lead the future wave then embracing open standards, opening up specs to things like self repair, will benefit them.
One final thing to demonstrate this they developed LDAC which is a compression / decompression algorithm over bluetooth but they haven't even implemented this on playstation and they have kept it closed off so it only works on Sony products. Why doesn't my Sony XM4 headphones not just work seamlessly with my playstation ? They miss so many opportunities - make it open spec to get kudos for the work put in to producing it or at the very least implement it into your most successful products like the playstation - I don't want the shitty plastic headsets you are selling when you sell these absolutely amazing headphones which work perfectly with your phones but not playstation - Again this is why it is important to have a software engineering team that can span all of your offerings and integration between them - they have tv channel services which are on freeview Sony owned but they aren't on playstation - why ?
Anyway wall of text done.
I should state first and foremost I do like Sony Products, generally speaking I think they go after engineering excellence.
Customer Service
They have and still do absolutely suck at this. PSN should offer refunds as standard, they can release time limited trials - they can keep track of time played on any game - the digital store should offer a no quibble refund policy. They really need to rethink how they handle customer service. Sure there will be a few that will try and abuse the system, but really you want your customers to feel like first class citizens for buying into your eco-system.
It should be fairly trivial for them to implement a solid refund service, if they believe in their products then this should be a no-brainer to implement. Give customers the ability to cancel pre-orders and to refund a game which is just bad within 48 hours or 2 - 3 hours game play.
I think it must be a Japanese cultural thing, but I think Sony as a whole underestimates how important customer service is. I personally will pay more for a product to buy from a company I know has excellent customer service, its the peace of mind you get with a product. The reason Amazon has been so successful is exactly because of customer service. Apple used to have amazing customer service, less so now (once upon a time my sister took back an ipod 3 years past warranty and they replaced it free of charge for her - I mean stuff like this is what keeps people buying and trusting products from a company)
Cost of Games
I am sorry $70, £70, 70 euros however you cut it, its just too much. I actually live in the UK, in the ps4 gen I think I paid about £40.
I still do not understand why a digital game costs more than a physical game. The digital store fronts artificially inflate the game prices with very very little overheard - the only cost for the game is the cost of storing it and transmitting it (customer downloading) both of which are negligible compared to printing & shipping of physical games. Digital store fronts should always be cheaper not more expensive than physical store fronts. The excuse about cost of game development increasing - I just do not buy. It is greedy and short sighted. I have to say this generation I am only buying games when they go on sale - I bought 2 or 3 (returnal, Spiderman MM) on release (even then I used sites which allowed me to buy gift cards I think I got a £100 gift card for £80 on shopto and another £50 for £40) - I refused to buy more and while I think Returnal is / has been my favourite game it was not worth £70 I love House Marque games. Artificially inflating all games costs to £70 just means customers will have to be more discerning with what they buy. I am not poor by any means my income is decent, but I don't just throw money away, for that reason I am reticent to buy any games at release I don't think this gen I will buy any other games at 70.
Marketing
They really suck at this, their xperia phone division had this "wow of now" marketing scheme which was just awful. They tend to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to actually producing products. I mean look at the Sony Viao Z ultrabook:
Playstation Games on PC
Being a platform holder is far more beneficial and valuable than just being a publisher. Publishers are currently being bought out by platform holders. Platform holders take a 30% cut on everything sold through their platform. Taking your most valuable component (the games) and acting like a publisher for another Massive platform holder to take a big cut - I really struggle to see the financial benefit here. If this ends up in the long term devaluing your platform then it is a massive misstep. Ultimately the knock on effects are not going to be seen now, but they will be seen by the next generation. Also why port to directX, they should be porting their engines and games to Vulkan if this is the route they wish to go down an open spec api which I think Sony should be embracing on all of its platforms, being tied down to an api completely owned and controlled by your competitor makes absolutely no sense. This is something they really need to think through.
Now this is just me speaking, but I think Sony could have been as big as Apple is now. They ventured into the media (Music and Films) but not into software, they have built a few pieces of software I believe they have some movie editing software some other bits and pieces, essentially with a solid software engineering team they could have begun to tie in all of their various and diverse systems into an ever evolving eco system like Apple. Their tv division is now using Android TV / Google Tv (which I really don't like) They had this cross media bar interface running on Linux before which was so fast and smooth instead they dumped it for the ever spying, ever in your face, really slow and clunky android tv. Their phones run Android, The playstation runs a custom version of FreeBSD, their laptops ran windows etc. Personally I think they should have taken something like Linux and started developing their own ui on top of it and then used this as the core to build everything else on, but built open standards something that would allow other manufacturers to also interoperate with great support and marketing this would be killer, it would be much like how Apple took *BSD / Mach Kernel and built their own ui on top - All apple products use this core (Unix & Linux are extremely flexible it can run on practically anything - Samsung uses Linux on their fridges, on their tvs, on their Washing Machines, they do use Android on their phones but everything else is fully under their control (They all run a version of tizen - why has Sony not done this ?? )).
This would all seem counter to a lot of my actual beliefs about open standards and open source, however I believe the 2 can co-exist. Many massive companies have already seen that co-operating and building open source cross platform standards actually lends itself to building better products it removes the entire engineering efforts from your own shoulders and allows those that are technically competent to jump in and build out that standard and it allows other companies to also contribute which ends up building a better product. I think Sony should still go down this route, I think being completely dependant on a closed source vendor for any component is a terrible idea. If they truly want to lead the future wave then embracing open standards, opening up specs to things like self repair, will benefit them.
One final thing to demonstrate this they developed LDAC which is a compression / decompression algorithm over bluetooth but they haven't even implemented this on playstation and they have kept it closed off so it only works on Sony products. Why doesn't my Sony XM4 headphones not just work seamlessly with my playstation ? They miss so many opportunities - make it open spec to get kudos for the work put in to producing it or at the very least implement it into your most successful products like the playstation - I don't want the shitty plastic headsets you are selling when you sell these absolutely amazing headphones which work perfectly with your phones but not playstation - Again this is why it is important to have a software engineering team that can span all of your offerings and integration between them - they have tv channel services which are on freeview Sony owned but they aren't on playstation - why ?
Anyway wall of text done.
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