As promised last July, Sony’s video game division has launched the deployment of its PlayStation Stars loyalty program, which will take place on October 13 in Europe. Through this program, the company wishes to reward the loyalty and personal investment of PS5 and PS4 players in the PlayStation ecosystem.
For the record, PlayStation Stars will be based on a point system that players can collect by completing various tasks. The most basic will simply be to log in at least once a month to your PlayStation Network account. The most complex will ask to be among the very first players to win a specific trophy, or to guess and launch games based on musical clues – this last mission corresponding to one of the very first campaigns launched on the program . Finally, purchases of full games from the PlayStation Store will be rewarded, but only for PlayStation Plus subscribers.
These points can then be exchanged for digital collectibles to display proudly on their virtual shelf (to be viewed on the PlayStation mobile app), or for funds for their PlayStation Network wallet. We finally learn that PlayStation Stars members will be able to access four different ranks, between which they will evolve according to their number of games purchased on the PlayStation Store and trophies “uncommon” won. Each level grants access to a set of specific digital collectibles.
A “priority access” to customer service which is already making people groan
But that’s not all. Launched today in Asia, the program has already revealed a very unexpected surprise there, in the bad sense of the term. Thus, loyalty level 4, the highest, not only gives access to a few insignificant virtual figurines, but also to priority access to the manufacturer’s customer service (as indicated for example on the dedicated page of the PlayStation website Malaysian official). We thus understand that when Sony Interactive Entertainment’s telephone advisers are all busy, level 4 PlayStation Stars members can happily cut the queue, even if it means extending the waiting time for the plebs of level 3 and below a little further.
This situation is unsurprisingly greatly grumbling Asian consumers, who rightly point out that all PlayStation customers should receive exactly the same level of service, regardless of the use they make of their games and consoles. At this time, nothing says that this policy will also be applied in Western territories, and we strongly hope that this will not be the case. The answer will arrive on October 5, when the program opens on the American markets, before Europe is finally served on the 13th of the same month.