Just before the new year Sony decided it high time to roll out a “public beta” version of their long-in-wait service, Playstation Home. Having not played with Home for any extensive amount of time I’m hardly qualified to speak of its virtues, much less its purpose. However, Rastafunk Abe and I caught an article on arstechnica recently detailing just how popular “add-on” items are despite limited assortment and bugs common with any beta software.
Sony is driving the micro-transaction to new levels and their program (game?) hasn’t even officially started. Take for instance the creation of “groups”… I can best liken this to a clanship of sorts, though limited to 31 users. In beta form, groups cost $5.00. In their final stage (I was warned upon trying to create a group…) they will incur monthly service fees to maintain. I dared to believe that anyone would pay for a half-hearted “Friend’s List” so I ran a search. All groups… I can’t tell you how many popped up, but it was at least several hundred.
Another pricing matter which took me by surprise was the total disparity between the various goods for sale. Fancy, designer coffee tables selling for $1 while a t-shirt sells for $2.50. I can only surmise the reason being that a coffee table is there for one’s personal enjoyment while a t-shirt is a walking advertisement visible to the masses.
The last thing that caught my attention was a comment posted in regards to the original ars story. One commenter asked the question “Who cares? What does it matter if people buy into this? Let them waste their money…” Which brings me to this post. I care because Sony is taking the lead in setting a precedent that’s quite dangerous to the consumer. I perceive the problem to be larger than a company simply charging real-world cash for petty online crap; rather, I believe that Sony, and other game studios, will dumb down their initial offerings without lowering the price of entry.
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