Sony's social media team is having a rough week: anything they post will be piled on by angry gamers who are outraged by Sony's plans to stop production of game discs.
Many PlayStation owners have vowed to boycott the PlayStation Store, cancel their PlayStation Plus membership, and never purchase PlayStation products again.
It's certainly a PR nightmare, as almost any PlayStation online content becomes a place for gamers to protest, derailing any attempt to talk about anything else.
It reminds me of the response to Sonos' introduction of a hugely buggy new app, which Sonos now admits was poorly made.
Sonos' PR nightmare lasted about 18 months, now there is optimism and rebuilt confidence around the new changes it brings 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 Did Right That Sony Probably Won't
Speaking to TechRadar earlier this year, Sonos CEO Tom Conrad laid out his views on trying to make angry customers happy again. “You just have to show up in people's lives with some humility and work hard to earn back their trust through great execution, a great product, great software, great experiences and never forget what you put people through.”
So far, Sony isn't doing that: Instead of responding to gamers' concerns, it's battening down the hatches and staying silent about its move to digital. And it's a shame, because there are real reasons for gamers to worry about Sony's decision.
There are three key concerns about digital. The first, and I think the most important, is the cost. The PlayStation Store is ridiculously expensive: for example spider man 2a game from three years ago, costs £69.99 digitally today in the UK, where I live. Competition between retailers means the record costs around £37.
The second is second-hand games. I buy a lot of games secondhand, and many gamers like to sell their games after they've completed them or bothered with them, so they can spend what they get back on more new games (a win for the industry as a whole). then 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 costs… you guessed it, £69.99.
To be fair, you can get both games and others in PlayStation Plus Extra. But not everyone wants or can keep another subscription, and we know that all subscription services increase in price, often dramatically, as we saw with Xbox Game Pass last year.
And the third is property. Sony's drive announcement came just days after it deleted customer files. bought copies of more than 500 movies, making it clear that buying does not mean owning forever. And those movies cost a lot less than £69.99.
Sony may have to eat low for a while to follow Sonos here, seek out customer reviews to talk about those concerns, and perhaps think about how to address them; For example, you could tell us that digital codes would still be sold through multiple retailers, as Nintendo does with its key cards, or that we could resell our digital-only games (even if you haven't developed the mechanism for this yet).
However, the reality is that for a company the size of Sony, even a significant customer backlash, like 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.
That's kind of a gamble. Just ask Microsoft, whose Game Pass price increase scared away many more customers than expected; It reportedly lost 4 million of 34 million Game Pass subscribers when expecting big growth, forcing a partial rollback.
But Sony's gaming business is much bigger, and that means it can still upset a lot of customers without feeling much pain.
I suspect Sony is going to learn a different lesson from the Sonos situation: Even at the height of customer anger, Sonos continued to sell lots of speakers, sound bars and subwoofers.
Then again, maybe Sony is more nervous than it currently lets on. Two days after the digital-only announcement, with customers fuming online, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki sold more than half of his Sony shares and Sony's chief strategy officer also dumped a bunch of Sony stock.
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