Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.
3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.
Except they’ve been selling in some of those countries for years? GoW, days gone, returnal, horizon series and Spiderman series are all available and some have been for years. It’s not about selling games in those countries, it’s about wanting to force PSN on the players. Can’t force PSN to people in countries where it’s not available so they’re not going to sell there.
I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.
The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.
I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.
I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.
FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.
Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.
You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.
Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.
3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.
Sucks, but it is what it is.
Except they’ve been selling in some of those countries for years? GoW, days gone, returnal, horizon series and Spiderman series are all available and some have been for years. It’s not about selling games in those countries, it’s about wanting to force PSN on the players. Can’t force PSN to people in countries where it’s not available so they’re not going to sell there.
I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
I can verify that retailers are selling the console and games, including forbidden west and ghost of Tsushima.
Sorry, I meant digitally.
I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.
The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!
Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.
I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.
I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.
FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.
Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.
Thanks for the nice reading.
Haha, glad you enjoyed it. My top-level comment is… not doing well.
Surely hireing a person so they could sell it other countries would would make them more money than that person wages cost
You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.