Get ready for SingStar on the XMB!

MordecaiHunter – you asked for a non generic reply… judge for yourself…

Hi Kieran,

Thanks for your e-mail about the Singstar Icon.

I can see that You are unhappy with our response to this. I’m happy to arrange for someone to give you a call back to discuss your query. I’d be grateful if you could reply to this e-mail with a contact telephone number and a convenient time to talk, so that I can arrange for one of our team to give you a call.
Please quote your reference number:3052624

Thank you,

Jason
PlayStation Support

not quite word for word but too close to be a coincidence, and not a generic cntl-v reply

Don’t bother with the call back. You’ll just get some Sony muppet who has been brain washed into thinking Sony are the greatest company in the world. It’s SCEE’s way of clearing you off the complaints list and pretending you’re now a happy customer.

what a waste of time that call was, the woman who phoned thought it was about my ps3 console itself she was asking for a serial number ^_^

after trying to explain to her that it was about a singstar icon, which was not easy, 10 mins later she said she would pass on my email to the development team… #PassTheBuck

So it’s optional for American users? That’s nice, make it optional for us as well.

adding my disapproval to this singstar ‘ad/spam’. Ive had to deal with rubbish like quickflicks icons, but at least they hide in their own XMB list, please don’t make my games folder untidy with this forced spam.

Just to add yet another vote to the pile. Please allow us to remove the singstar icon from the xmb. I have no interest in the game (if you heard me sing you’d understand why!)and having Sony force it on me is an abuse of their position as the platform holder. Would Google force all their users to have an icon for an app they want to sell on all users’ home screens on android? Would Apple make all their users have to have a particular app in the apps list? Clearly not.

Sony have recently revised the PlayStation store and that gives them the perfect mechanism for promoting particular titles. Why has it therefore been forced on users through the xmb? Clearly one icon isn’t a lot, but if Sony continues this strategy then it will make the xmb a cluttered mess

will old fred have an update on this for us before the 30 day cut off and this thread gets closed? or are sony just stalling waiting for the magic day when replies get closed?..

i know its not freds fault, and from what ive seen his replies on other threads seem informative and friendly.

i guess we just wait for singstar/london studios to make another blog entry then carry this thread on then?

A recent reply assures us that this thread is still being read by people at SOny, though whether they are the people that matter is another thing entirely… But I’d just like to say that since this singstar icon has been cluttering up my xmb, and the new playstation store has been a pain in the backside, I have NOT purchased the following games from the store:
Resident Evil Code Veronica X
Resident Evil 4
Okami HD Edition
Assassin’s Creed 3
Lego Lord of the Rings pre-order.

A quick calculation shows that adds up to almost £100. That’s £100 that Sony won’t be getting off me. If they can’t reliably offer fixes to problems that are their fault in the first place, then they don’t get my money. I hope someone from Sony is reading this. SOny, you are, essentially, fired. I am no longer paying you to entertain me.

Same here Clinodactyl, I’ve bought Resi Evil 6 & Black ops 2 on my Xbox instead, strangely the advert laden dash on the Xbox irritates me less than the singspam ad does. Lots of small ads are better than 1 fullscreen ad that doesn’t change.

I swear, there must be a gas leak at the SCEE building, because some of the things they come up with are beyond belief. As much as I enjoy playing games, Sony need to remember that I pay them for a service, not the other way around, and if I feel that they’re not providing a level of quality and service that I’m happy with, I’ll take my money and time elsewhere. Sony are far from the only games company around, and becoming complacent and indifferent to their paying customers is a quick and surefire way for them to lose business. Especially with this absolutely atrocious move that means American users DON’T get lumped with the singstar icon. Sony’s attitude can be summed up like this:

Sony: “Who the hell are you?”
Me: “I’m the person who gives you money and buys your games, so I’d like some respect, thanks!”

I don’t care for it. I don’t want it. +1 for removal

Hi !

First of all: Accidentally i wrote to the US
customer support and they were telling me:

“I understand your frustration”

Well if you do then please tell your
european colleagues to let users decide themselves
whether they want the icon or not.

The whole thing is a TOTAL SHAME FOR SONY !!!

Hi again !

Here’e an IDEA HOW to GET RID OF THE ICON.
Unfornatutely at the moment I’m not
skilled enough to carry it out be in
principle it should work.

Have you tried PS3 THEMES? If you google
for PS3 Themes you’ll find different themes
and also tools for creating them.

Most of them even change the icon for
existing XMB entries. So it should
be possible (for example) to assign
an EMPTY icon to singstar (yes, it’ll
still be there be it’ll draw less attention).

From what I saw it’s also possible
with theme designer tool to change the
order of submenu entries (so we could
move the icon to the buttom, maybe even
get rid of it).

————————————–

TO FRED: thank you for at least reading this
thread once in a while and leaving a note.
—————————————

TO ALL OF SONY: Get rid of the icon.
I don’t want to spend my time with designing
themes and finding tricks how to get rid of
the icon.

@ bjoern_essen

When you create a custom theme you can only change the XMB icons, Players Met, System Settings, Internet Browser, etc. You won’t be able to change the SingSpam icon…….great idea though.

If you’re not worried about losing your trophies or breaking Sony’s Terms and Conditions you can create a USA account on your console – NO SingSpam icon

Hi Nina. First time poster here. Just thought i would ask you to pass on my unhappiness about the icon being forced on the XMB to the appropriate people, and maybe ask them to remove the icon please, seeing as though i asked really nicely. Also, are there any plans to remove it soon, as it seems Im not the only one unhappy? Thank alien_toshie.

FRED

Have you got any answers to why the US PS3 Players did not get the forced icon placed on them but with the option from there store

You need to get someone on here who will give us a answer !

Come to think of it there are more icons burned into my XMB (movie
related). I want them gone too.
But the singstar icon is by far the most annoying one. Moving the
icon is not an option for me anymore. I want it gone and never to be heard from again.

Hi Fred, can you give us contact to your superior, maybe blog staff is afraid to report about this problem with enough emphasis.
This is simply unacceptable, it’s nice that you read comments but you should give us answers, if you can’t give us answers because you don’t have any, give us contact to someone who is responsible that you don’t have answers after all these weeks.
It’s beyond my understanding why is so hard for SCEE to admit misjudgment or whatever you want to call it. Especially after US got SingStar as optional download from the Store without SingStar fullscreen spam that EU customers got.

Hi Sony again , when the PSN was hacked i was upset but it wasnt your fault so had understanding , but this is something you have fully under control so why dont you address it or at least give us some answer and justification for such treatment

Another response from Head Office, after asking to know why they made the icon non-deletable;

“I’m sorry that you remain unhappy that the SingStar icon on the PlayStation 3 cannot be removed from the PS3 XMB. The decision was made to provide an easy and convenient way for users to access SingStar and, as is the case with other XMB icons, I can confirm that it’s not possible to delete it. I do understand you are frustrated by this, however I am unable to provide any comment or information on this matter further than that which I provided to you in my last e-mail.”

I am so, so sick of this now.

Hi, I just noticed I have some SingStar spam in my games folder among the games I’ve actually paid.

Please remove it in the next update or at least give an option to remove it.

As the spam entry is in the top of the games list this is really annoying and in my doesn’t make me want to try the game but quite the opposite.

I can see you’re really excited about bringing f2p to consoles but please give me an option to at least not be reminded about it every single time I launch a game in my PS3s.

Thanks,
Hulu

*sigh* I seriously feel like I want to boycott SCEE right about now.

are we not allowed to post email addresses for other SONY employees (from the sony website) on here?? ive tried 3 or 4 times and after ‘waiting moderation’, messages have disappeared…

im going to report this post as well, maybe someone will answer it then?

as customer services, fred, etc havent been able to answer anything, i have started to email other sony employees, all their email addresses are on the sony website… google is your friend, even if the moderators here try to prevent it

@kieran – I think they are trying to keep individuals names out of it. I noticed that even though the email I sent to Sony Head Office was titled “Singstar Icon and Nina Scherer”, it came back titled “Singstar Icon and the EU Blog”. I think it’s part of the wall of fog Sony have thrown up around this, trying to minimise any individual’s accountability. I saw your post with the various emails over on the Feedback blog though – good work bud, it’s good to know there’s others out there who are keeping up the fight

Lets try. At http://presscentre.sony.eu/content/detail.aspx?NewsAreaId=30&ReleaseID=98 you find some email addresses from Sony. If you think sony support can’t provide some reasonable answer to sing spam you can ask other sony people.

@Supersmith – I know exactly how you feel. I’m sick and tired of this, just totally sick and tired.

i just feel i have invested so much money and more importantly time with sony, at some point in the past i subconciously chose trophies over gamer points…

now i get spammed with a pair of moronic singstar idiots staring down at me through their dim uncomprehending eyes, every time i turn my playstation on…

i own 2 ps3, vita, xbox etc… and i hate turning on my ps3 at the moment

sony have made me sad

customer services just copy paste their replies, no one can even say ‘tough luck you lot, its staying. hey, try it, you might like it!’ (apart from nina, of course)

the silence and being ignored has convinced me to cancel my plus auto renewal,.

i want to play need for speed, ac3, cod, but have put off buying them, i want to know if i should get them for xbox or ps3, i would love for this to be sorted and buy them on ps3, to carry on trophy collecting, but, thanks to singstar, i just dont feel like it
thank god ive still got world of warcraft to fall back on in times like this

i have absolutely no inerest in this product and fail to see why i have no opportunity to remove it from my console! this bland disregard for the end user is what drove so many gamers away to competing markets a couple of years ago. anyone else thats driven here in anger and frustration, go into system settings, auto updates and turn off download and install ‘reccomended’ games/apps. it wont get rid of this rubbish, but it will stop sony randomly deciding to install any other unwanted crap on your system.

@kieran I’d strongly recommend getting CoD on Xbox, its looks significantly better & you’ll encounter less problems than the PS version. I’ve got WWE 13, CoD and resident evil 6 all on Xbox since this singspam started. Its a shame Sony have stubbornly kept it but its their loss not mine.

@Dragomyrr, kieranmarsh and tom-359-ds; Are you guys making a slapstick comedy? You guys have made me genuinely laugh pretty hard.

You seriously emailing about this? Getting a response which you don’t like, sending it higher, get the same response, sending it again, same response, etc, etc, and you send again expecting a different response?

It can only be for kicks. I mean nobody is really that dumb. Good one guys. Made me smile. Should tell more folk about the laugh you’re having!

you know what makes me laugh even more…. sad people who troll a forum/blog to complain about people complaining… now that is sad

./ignore

add me on xbox if you want (not sad trollers)

kieranmarsh -same as psn

@kieranmarsh; Try reading that again. Nice and slow this time. Not once did I say there’s anything wrong with complaining.

Although there is a clear irony in what you said about complaining about complainers; you realise you just complained about someone who was not complaining about anything or anyone? ^^

I posted a few weeks back and said my piece, most the time you would forget about a blog after that amount of time, any guesses why I cant? Ill tell you, its the 2 plastic people that pop up every time I take a disc out of my console, be it to change game, play a bluray or listen to a CD, My whole Sony experience is turning into a Singstar one, im sick of it, If Sony dont listen maybe we should take this issue to Singstar, surely they know this is hurting their image, maybe they would want to take it off there, or is this wishfull thinking? Yeah I can see that this may seem petty to some but for me and many who I know that is not the case, I mean how difficult would it be to remove it, the update would be less than a megabyte.

Or maybe with Elder Scrolls Online on the horizon I should look at other options, PC games are cheap too, none of this 59.99 rip offs and theres a lot more intelligent titles, those that think XBOX is the way forward are mistaken in my opinion, they are worse than SO(singstar)NY.

./ignore… still trolling eh…

THE_ADRENALIN

http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/SingStar/Feedback-on-the-Singstar-XMB-icon/m-p/17528308/highlight/false#M19302

youll have to copy/paste and take out the space that this blog adds but i think singstar has been informed

Come on Sony…..Enough is Enough is sometimes not Enough for you. I appreciate you strive to be the best. Why would you have a DLC based user defined XMB, (supposedly a unique and personalised experience) and then force unwanted, insulting and overriding adverts upon your loyal customers. I have a stunning picture of the LHC in Switzerland as my Backdrop. It fills me with awe and inspires me daily. Yet despite me being a PS+ subscriber from day 1, you fill my XMB with 3rd party graffiti (ads). We can all appreciate that it’s just a press of the controller to restore a sense of equilibrium, but why the bells should we have to. We are the customers, Without us you are nothing, We demand more respect.

-> I am not interested in singstar
-> I don’t want to try it
-> I don’t need an ‘easy and convenient way for users to
access SingStar’
-> I am not interested in singstar

Somehow I am still waiting for a remove option. Lack of
common sense I guess.

Another update and the SingStar icon is still on my XMB. Please allow me to remove this icon… Please!?

come on now, your taking the *** now with this, get this **** of my console or at least let us move it, I honestly can’t believe we’re being ignored on this.

Hi Singstar team,

Please remove the singstar icon from my ps3 , i have not asked for it and i do not want it.

US can decide is they want it so please stop forcing it to EU cusomers.

We already waiting too long for a solution so please fix it because the placament of your software on my console is degrading my ps3-product satisfaction.

I have not agreed to installing a unremovabole singstar application because it was not mentioned in the firmware update notes.

Please correct your mistake and remove the icon from my console or let me delete it.

Thanks.

Still silence.

looks like there is no plan to remove the singstar spam fr5om our console , since today there is a headline news on the sinstar page , promoting this addition , i suggest to leave feedback there as well:

http://www.singstar.com/en_GB/news/XMB-announcement.html

How do I get rid of this? I want to play cod not karaoke.

Another week passes.
Just make it optional like in the USA! There’s no excuses, you’ve shown it can be done. It wouldn’t be an issue anymore then.