Today Sony released the smoother, sexier PlayStation Store. It has delivered on its promises: intuitive navigation, significant speed improvements and improved access to all the content.
Well, at least for North America. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the categories present in the new European/UK Store – they simply do not allow users to access all the content logically.
A post of the Fragcast blog by ‘Genki Rocket’ explains the issue quite well:
On the UK store the main categories are:
* Latest
* All Games
* Game Add-Ons
* Videos
* PSP Games
* Family Games
* ‘other’ media(what?!)
* We recommend
This is just crazy… so if you’re looking for a demo, you need to either go to latest, or if it’s not there, look in all games – which are sorted into sub groups by genre, not title. Also, all PSone games are mixed in with the genres… so if you want a PSone game you need to find it in the melange of other titles… is Sony Europe bonkers?
On the USA store:
* New Releases
* Downloadable Games
* View All by Title
* Add-ons
* Demos
* Videos
* Themes and Wallpapers
* Featured Items
These categories make perfect sense – you can find the same piece of content multiple ways, and if you go to ‘downloadable games’ the titles are split by platform (PS3, PSP, PS Eye, PSone Classics) and other sorting (top downloads, genre, alphabetical)…
I, for one, share this guy’s pain. In fact, the US Store had an A-Z before the re-design. SCEE deciding to miss out on this basic function is madness.
We reckon a lot of you out there feel the same way about this bizarre categorisation, especially if you’ve set up both European and US accounts on your PS3 and can see the huge difference. We’re hoping to get in touch with SCEE about this, but you can help us by leaving a comment, even a short one, showing your disagreement with the current categories.
We know it’s human nature to get what we want and then find something else to moan about soon after. But the new Store is near-perfect. Whoever deals with the Store at Sony Europe – please listen to our final request!
PSU readers: Leave a comment below and be sure to check out the Fragcast blog.