PlayStation.Blog Recap

Fred, still no news about When Vikings Attack?

I’m dying of curiosity and I think after 6 weeks there should at least be SOME information about it!

I’m sorry to always come back asking but I’d really like to get some news on it and knowing that you’ve already seen the winners just makes me wonder why there still aren’t any news..

Fantastic… loads of unhappy customers, store in chaos, content missing and the SCEE blog manager is in Japan. Not a single apology for this weeks balls up. It’s ok though, he’s over there getting some pointless junk for a competition. That’ll help!

@ FIFA13,
can anyone confirm if the ea season ticket has worked, as after buying it we are supposed to have been able to also buy fifa13 off the store, Today,am trying to get as much info as i can about this and will really appreciate it if anyone can tell me if it worked as it was meant to. .. i was going to get ue, but due to the mix up with b2 i opted to use psn credit instead, btw it isn’t for me, just getting it for someone, gave them the credit etc, so i really hope it has worked, as i told him. (nephew) he could be playing it today.. really need to know if theres any probs, thanks.

Is there any chance at all of either of the dino crisis’s coming to the uk psn please respond thanks

It was sort of a good week I just wish the 500GB New PS3 was going to be under £199 & the 12GB PS3 would of been £149.99 then SONY would have cleaned up this Xmas. Hopefully internet shops & high street shops will sell those PS3′s at those prices when we get nearer to Xmas.
+ ‘LittleBigPlanet PS Vita’ looks BRILLIANT
But still?!?! no ‘MGS:Peace Walker HD’ on PSN? That was a shock & BIG disappointment for me this week & last week

@Voodoo341

He didn’t say he was in Japan to get a prize for the weekend debate, he said:

“One more thing: many apologies for the lack of a Weekend Debate yesterday but my travels this week got in the way of finalising a prize. This will return next Friday with some super-rare Sony Japan goodies up for grabs.”

That means he’s been travelling, which is why we didn’t have a weekend debate this week. However, the weekend debate will return next week and it will feature a Sony Japan prize.

He never said that he was travelling to get a prize for the weekend debate. (He could have, but he never said it). He was probably there for the Tokyo Game Show, so he can cover it on the PS blog, you know, because he’s the Blog Manager.

You should read more carefully before you complain about something.

Hi Fred. Just a question about the “Big in Japan” selection in the PlayStation Store. I thought it looked like a sale, but all the prices look normal (Hyperdimension Neptunia mk-2 AU$79.95, for example). Is this just an error, or is it not meant to be a sale?

I tried searching for info on it, but came up empty. Any help would be appreciated.

Heyo Fred.

i do college on weekdays and i need to get up at 8 am but i go on my ps3/vita untill 2 am and normally i miss college due to me waking up so late, so when will the wake up club vita app come to EU? the US got it ages ago and i need it to wake up in time for college so i need this app!

thanks

So while SCEE SEN continues to fall further into a chaotic circus, Fred the SCEE Blog Manager skips away to this years TGS. Can someone explain to me why any employee of this Blog needs to be there?

Are blog staff involved in game development? Erm, no. Even for Fred and Co to say they work in the game industry is tentative at best. It’s a Blog site, uploading articles written by other people, and occasionally answering and questions with vague copy & paste answers. The broken (taking 3 months to fix it) Store is a mess, and certainly not in any condition that should allow Fred to swan off to Tokyo (the justification of which still baffles me).

The money wasted on Freds business-class flight, and 5 star accommodation would’ve been better spent on hiring a freelance programmer to sort out the mess with the Store. Or even sending an actual member of a development team to the show. Not a blogger lol.

This company is out of control.

Well it has been a controversial week Fred while you’re away at the TGS.

Store was buggy especially in Plus section, an error with LBV download, DD: Neon was two days late due to developer handed in wrong version, more complaints about CS:GO not hitting Europe yet for the 5th time even though still no news about it, more shovelware on PS2, Klonoa had emulation issues, another 1000 complaints hit on store blog and Nick had to step in to apologize for the LBPV issue, and of course people are threatened to go to Steam or Xbox Live due to SCEE’s poor service. It’s been a nightmare for us PS gamers.

Have to say while I didn’t care much for the Double Dragon Neon trial version since playing the full game through I’ve kinda fallen in love with it. Easily one of my favorite games of the year. And the ending song is just awesome. And it didn’t cost me a thing cos it’s another great freebie from PlayStation Plus.

Looking forward to the supposed patch that’ll give online co-op. Very much want to play it with my friends online and I have no one local that’s into gaming.

@Voodoo341; If you look at the LBP issue entry, you will see an apology from Nick Caplin. Also, had the blog manager been here, what would you have expected to happen differently? Blog manager isn’t the store manager…

@DAVIE222; I’d invest in an alarm clock.
^^

@Scuffy_P; Let’s see what he comes back with before criticising, unless that seems unfair? I’m sure, through witnessing comments for other events, that many would rather the blog manager be there to have some sort of coverage. As for costs, let’s not make wild assumptions.

The show must go on.

Fred should have chased down some Sony staff members over there for answers about CS:GO

Is CS:GO coming out during the supposed store revamp happening in october? if there even is one happening i only heard a few places mentioning there was going to be a revamp, but not many sites have actually mentioned it and that kind of thing is usually big.

Ignoring the obvious absence of CS for the moment, I am more curious on what will be happening with Legend of Dragoon, as buying it on the US store won’t allow me to play it on my EU account, it’s been out for around 5 months or so, I hate being having things last.

Fred

Can you tell me wen Sly copper thieves in time demo?

From 007

you forgot to list the rather tactless post by the “head of communication for scee”, surely the most ironic job description ever, where he offers no apology to people affected by the shambles on the store this week.
and then to add insult to injury, he adds this little gem.

“If you haven’t downloaded LBP PS Vita yet, here’s a taste of what you are missing: the most critically acclaimed PS Vita game to date.”

and this is the person in charge of communication for scee, it explains so much.

with somebody like that in charge, we’ll never find out what’s going on with missing content.
why has CS GO not launched?
where is Auditorium?
what’s delaying the addition of a game that’s been on the store for three years being adeed to plus for weeks after the devs said it would be?

there’s a quote i think sums up the problem with scee.

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.”

@fred

diden’t you say the survey that U.K had would be made for the other countries that weren’t included? so where is it or does this just proff my facts SCEE coulden’t care less about the smaller countries the only countries that count 2 SCEE are U.K,germany,france,spain, it seem any country list aren’t really SCEE consumers cause they getting excluded with content more and more.

I’m more disgusted with SE & a little bit for scee, SCEA & SEA shows more love to NA on the NA blog it posted their to get FF3 for PSP on tuesday, while we in EU don’t know if SEE [sqaure enix europe] is to release FF3 this week as well.

I’m still getting cheese off & sicked getting treated like Mud.

@ Project2insanity

Financial waste is an issue here.

Sony’s 2011 fiscal year came in at a whopping $2 Billion loss. 2012 fiscal year (running April ’11 to March ’12) ended on a $820 Million loss (granted technology sales fared better last year). Specifically, Sony’s gaming division hasn’t made a profit in nearly 5 years.

Studio Liverpool closes after 18 years. Internal 1st party games cancelled throughout most remaining studios. Redundancies across all gaming departments (yet I’m sure Nick Caplin receives a handsome salary for a job he’s clearly not suited for; Head of Communications’s….hysterical), and Sony send the new Blog Manager away to Tokyo when he certainly needed to be here trying to take control of this ridiculous mess. It’s a joke.

Fred will write one or two short pointless pieces of what he saw at TGS, when we could simply receive the same information from publishers themselves regarding specific titles. Simply a waste of time and money during a period when Sony haven’t the finances to throw around.

Sony don’t have the money pit like Microsoft or Apple…and they most certainly don’t have the staff.

Hey, please could you guys look into getting the Red Dead Redemption avatars fixed? They’re all ‘Broken Images’.

Don’t hold your breath Alex. I requested this months ago, here, on the forum, and by messaging Sony staff on Twitter. The PS Store has no competition, so they don’t seem to care. They’ve also just pushed a fixed for the two month old PS Store “blank spaces” problem (particularly in the PS+ section) and ended up breaking it in a completely different way. Go take a look and weep.

@Skookie30:
Even though I’m not a fan of FF, it least give them credit for giving us classic gems like every single Tomb Raider was out, all three Gexes were out and heck, US hasen’t got Enter the Gecko I think and yes I know SE can be selfish with FF releases.

@fauxtronic:
Well there will be a revamp to the store soon so it should fix all these glitches.

@Scuff_P:
Yeah, sending a Blog manager was a big mistake and so does shutting down Studio Liverpool. I mean this is why SCEE doesn’t care about us anymore. Look at Home for example, they got a Namco space, we don’t but instead, we got stupid content and let’s not to mention the EOD TV is useless with no decent content to watch what so ever. I swear if this bad service keeps up. SCEE will lose customers and will move to Xbox Live and Steam for digital gaming. It’s an outrage.

ok so there may have been some issues this week but… is Fred really sposed to sort them all?? at least he bothers to reply to us a lot of the time. and hey who can honestly say they wouldn’t jump at the chance to go to tgs if your bosses offered eh??
bit excited for this jap prize may have to make an effort on next week’s debate!

@Project2insanity

The LBP issue wasn’t the only issue this week, it was one of many. The complete lack of information on the blog didn’t help. In fact it added to the frustration felt by many people.

@fjernbetjening

He’s going to cover TGS a week after everyone else? lol Don’t panic though, the Japan Sony junk he’s bringing back will keep the loyal happy. He’s the blog manager, the blog is a disaster and it’s his job to sort it.

@Scuffy_P; Can we please just give Fred the chance to show his hand before judging? You’re by no means a fool and I can understand the points you’re making but do you really believe if he was here, he would have ‘taken control’?

Yes, it was a mess but I’d say, despite the lack of immediate communication, it was resolved rather efficiently (don’t take that the wrong way- it doesn’t excuse the errors occurring in the first place).

Lastly, the purpose of him being sent, I’m sure you’ll agree, is for marketing. There’s no denying the financial problems in the company but that doesn’t mean the content he brings can’t swing influence enough to bring in revenue which can potentially outweigh the cost of his trip. If it was a case of publishers giving out their information by self, we wouldn’t have these shows so there’s definite reason behind it.

I’m not sure if this is just me this is happening to, but i keep getting 404 error messages when i try to view PS Blog posts on the PS3 version of eu.playstation.com. …

Lots of people moaning on here what’s go on the only thing iam still waiting for is the re5 avatars from last year.

you quick calling SCEE for being useless tools with the week by week mess they find themselves in, & criticise my post if you want to see partially between the 2 blogs [SCEE & SCEA] you want see them here .

if you read again ff3 was announce last week where is ours, Yes SE were uselessly good record releasing content on par with NA we have all the FF im grateful for that as for tomb raider games it took 5 years to get them is that what people want? No.

I’m over my disgusted of what SE did in E3 sign a deal with MS, muti platform games i welcome them, they get money that way then doing exclusive deals, the less exclusive we see the better chance Ps3 get that game too.

Been a very poor week for EU PSN indeed and the timing of Mr. Dutton’s visit to TGS was unfortunate to say the least but to say things would have been different if he was here

Been a very poor week for EU PSN indeed and the timing of Mr. Dutton’s visit to TGS was unfortunate to say the least but to say things would have been different if he was here is foolish. Sony’s policy seem to be to comment on problems as little as possible and Mr. Dutton would not have been able to communicate anymore than what Jawad and the so called head of communications did. I dunno about the store having a revamp but the whole SCEE policy on information needs to be reworked from the ground up before everything implodes on it self.

* we shall wait a response tomorrow blog as silence by SCEE & SE = Not good as it uselessly mean there be no or a maybe possibility that we get FF3 this week, next month.

on the subject of partially ross said SCEE plus be partially with SCEA but it will take a few months since he left SCEE plus i didn’t see any partially with SCEA just better games then SCEA got but there do get updates more dueing the months, their do finally get the games what we get & we get what they get but it hardly partially is it?

so i see ross department as a fail to deliver that promise, i believe ross is with gearbox a great dev.

* correction: if you want to see partially between the 2 blogs [SCEE & SCEA] you wont see them here.

The store wasn’t bad just this week! It was terrible this week but it has been bad for weeks now. Also there’s no point telling us all about these great games when you can’t deliver them.

@dogwalker it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d been here. He’s here during all the other shambles. Kind of twisting the knife in though to their frustrated customers to get an update from the guy who’s in charge of communicating information on this blog about his jolly to Japan while thousands of customers have been left in the dark and ripped off all week.

Quite a lot of negativity here. And while I agree that criticism is well deserved, negativity is something entirely different.

Nick and Fred both clearly pin point the store as high priority and describe that we’ll see some real change there within next month. I don’t know about you others, but for me that is enough to resist pessimism (for now ).

@Scuffy_P @supersmith2500
I somehow doubt that one persons visit to Tokyo has an huge impact on the financial result. Especially as marketing and PR usually tend to spend money on far weirder opportunities.
And if Fred should really be a copy & paste guy, he did a mighty good job of hiding that fact so far.

@Fred
No idea how serious the store changes will be, but if they should be mentionable – how about a little introduction before it goes live?

And any news on the successor of Ross?

@Golwar:
In speaking of Ross I think he works for Take 2 Interactive now. Also I just hope this won’t happen again.

Hi Fred, I hope you had a wonderfull time in Japan and I was wondering if you had the time to ask the questions you asked us to tell you?

While on comunicating, the store update for both the regular store and Plus is always a mess. You and your collegs often give usefull info but we have to search for it on page 16 or 21 and that is not as easy as it could be.
Please designate a update portion on top of the article that informs about known errors and updates. Thanks.

@Fred

Why sony havent same store internetional. This is best way fot future.

@Golwar

The negativity is SCEE’s own fault entirely. Zero communication, continual errors and incompetence has left a lot of people feeling Sony don’t offer anything like as good a service as Microsoft or even SCEA. Again, take a look at the avatars of the people complaining and you’ll see most are PSN+ subs. It’s the hard core SCEE are losing now. As for wait to see what they do. Heard it all before. Empty promises! I’ve copied a link to a question and answer session with the European Store Manager. It’s all very, very deja vu but if you look at the date it’s from 2009. Here we are in 2012 still complaining about the same things! Here we go with more promises to change yet again.

http://www.vg247.com/2009/08/12/scee-responds-to-complaints-over-eu-psn-content/

Hi Fred, thank you for your answer and I appreciate you positive outlook for the store. But as a day 1 customer I learned to live with the broken store and the fact that lots of wrong ideas and mistakes were made when Sony started it. New to global online services and a culture that doesn’t like expertise from the outside the scale of the mistakes grew as the store grew.
The only thing to do is to rethink and rebuild it but that will cost an enormous amount of money so I’m afraid they choose to fix it endlessly like a kind of Operation Petticoat submarine (do you know that show?). So a fixed spot on the blog for customers to find out what went wrong and how it’s fixed would be very helpful.

lol, seems quiet now. I bet people would be enjoying LBP Vita by now.

Fred Dutton, please consider this.
Having just bought a Vita I have enjoyed it immensely so far however; after buying MGS:HD and the two Grand theft auto stories I would like to request either a PSP game sale OR a general reduction in PSP game prices. Having owned, played and completed many PSP games I feel I would like to revisit them but, on my Vita of course. However, paying £6.99/7.99 a pop for a very old game in digital format is just too steep. For example, at the current prices I will only buy Monster Hunter: FU however; if the prices were changes to say, £4.99/3.99 a game I would buy both MH:FU and Splinter Cell: Essentials for my vita.

Please consider this request and please try to get something done about it; I’m loving my Vita and would love to play MH:FU and SC:E with dual-analog stick support.

Thankyou.

Any chance we will be seeing Final Fantasy III for PSP on the store this week, if so hopefully with Vita Support.

@Voodoo341
You mixed up 2 entirely different topics.
Our topic was the PSN store as the platform for sales. Its technological background, functionality, structure, design etc.

You talk about third party release dates and delays in Europe. So I don’t really get what kind of connection you see there. We clearly talked about expected changes in the first category.

Besides, you exaggerate quite a lot. For example: “Zero communication”?
Sorry, but you might want to compare the experience here with some other official sites and then come back to beg for absolution.

Sure, they don’t reply to 100% of all questions being raised and neither can they answer everything. Either because they don’t know the answer or because they can’t reveal it. And of course not each phrasing or announcement is always perfect and pleasing everyone. All that is relatively natural and logical.

Imho they are doing a very good job to communicate on the EU blog, at least on the english version. The best evidence is that we all are posting here. Would you waste your time with comments here all the time, if you’d be entirely ignored and your opinion wouldn’t matter to them at all? Thought so.

DO NOT BE RUDE TO FRED

you guys are hypocrites, next thing your going to do is blame fred for no dawnguard dlc. He is ONE & only ONE Man helping you out for people In different country’s who are having difficulties releasing there games. His job is to post blog’s and post comments about game problems, your having problems on games not being released on europe? blame the developers of the game or the company, it’s NOT sony’s job to decide the price, THINK. Sony USA, Sony EU, Sony UK, Sony JP etc, fred is one blog manager in the uk. go complain to sce Ceo.
Fred actually try’s. you think he has the answers to counter strike problems? he asks and he gets little answers.YOU GO TO JAPAN/AMERICA GET AN SMALL STATEMENT FROM THE DEVELOPER, STILL RUN THE BLOG & RETURN TO UK,
fred is a great manager, he did the things which james couldn’t, now i say it again, an blog manager vs an ceo/someone in charge of an store. he has little power yet try’s hard

“so you can be sure I’ll be looking into what went wrong and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Improving the store is a huge priority, and hopefully you’ll see the fruits of that soon.”

no offense Fred, but talk is cheap, we’ve all heard that line time and time again.

we’ve even seen managers trotted out to spout those empty words.

i know the store is not your specific area though so i’ll cut you some slack.
but the blog is and the post by the so called head of communication on the blog should be part of your jurisdiction.
so get him to show a little tact at the very least.
maybe a little compassion for people who have paid for, and in a few cases have been overcharged for, content they never recieved.
and not put something out that almost seem designed infuriate already angry customers.

because you know what’s worse than no information?
a post that offers no apologies and then proceeds to mock those put out by your companys mistake.

My two cents. agree with juahn_1234, obviously i believe the majority of regular users also do.. those ruder posts are mostly made by occasional posters, or those general cannot be pleased ever types, saying that though i have read some really well writen criticism of scee’s service these last two/three weeks And what ottoT said about opo petticoat kind of operation/business that scee is (unfortunately) now involved in made perfect sense, personally i didn’t start ps3 till late 09, and am sure others even later So seeing this business model from our perspective Would make ‘us’ wonder what kind of game is scee playing here.. and Not knowing the score as day1 users do would make for the majority of the hate brigades anger.. i have write many nasty comments here, But i haven’t aimed them at the blog team, though, i believe i have been on the bad end of one (or two) replies, Because of the ruder posts, and ppl assuming that criticising here is somehow offending the team, we aren’t All like that though, and not everone can word critical comments (or others) as good as some..Am hoping for changes.

Maybe next weekend’s debate should be on whether we are too harsh in blog comments? Whilst I reckon scee more than deserve the criticism they’ve received in recent weeks, especially for not opening up and accepting responsibility, some of it has got far too personal.

Having said that I’m also sceptical about rumoured changes. I get the feeling they won’t go far enough. my download list is impossible to find anything on, the store is messy and content lacking. Unless the UK is moved to its own region I really doubt much will change other than cosmetically.

@Fred

gotta agree with HazelAM been here since the start nothing but empty promises and lie’s over the year the many time they said it was gonna improve and it just got worse and worse. you said the survey for U.K was gonna be either last week or the week before that well nothing so that was also just a lie.
it’s kinda funny how they always say we care about giving all off europe the content yet more and more countries are getting excluded by their own policy’s.

@chrisandsheva
the biggest problem with SCEE is they like 2 make gamers forget content in the past a lot off content diden’t get release on the european store and when asked the store team just ignored it hoping ppl would forget about it so they woulden’t have 2 try and get it on the store so now they made up the we have 2 ask the publishers for them excuse.

Wow, that’s great. Thankyou very much.