Sony drops pricing info from its PlayStation Blog updates

Readers of the PlayStation Blog are used to posts highlighting new deals and quoting prices in pounds and euros. That, however, is now a thing of the past.

From now on gamers will have to actually click through to Sony’s online store to discover the price of a game. That’s certainly going to make the frequent sale updates less accessible.

Obviously this is not as straightforward as just seeing the price listed in the blog post, and we understand the frustration many of you have expressed at the change,” Sony’s community mad Fred Dutton said.

Here at SCEE, we cater for a huge number of territories across Europe and beyond, many of which use different currencies. In fact, we cater for about 20 different currencies across more than 30 countries. We’re both legally and ethically obliged not to be misleading in our communications, and by only listing prices in, say, and €, we are potentially giving gamers in territories who do not use those currencies a false impression of the cost of an item.

So we’re left with two options: either publish every currency price for every item, or ask you to click through to PlayStation Store to see an accurate local price, which is generated automatically based on your ISP’s location.

If you were to take a typical PlayStation Store promotion featuring around 100 discounted items, the blog post would have to feature around 2,000 separate prices to be compliant. That would not only be impractical to create, but it would also make the blog post very difficult to read. Duly, we’ve made the difficult decision to remove pricing information and ask you to click through to PlayStation Store.”