While I am fully up to date on the Microsoft, Nintendo, and Apple online ecosystems, my understanding of Sony's digital offering has been rudimentary at best, because the last time I owned a Playstation, it was a PS2. I resolved to get current when enough trade-ins made it feasible to do so without risking a missed customer sale. Q4 2019 was good for that, so I've finally had an opportunity to delve a little deeper and catch up. And that led to an interesting story of how I took great pains to avoid a problem that it turns out had a very simple solution.
To understand the problem, you have to understand how we got here, and I'm obnoxiously prolix and discursive so I'll do this in the form of a trip down memory lane. Here we go:
Years ago, I spent more hours playing games on the Playstations 1 and 2 than I'm proud to admit. I had to turn my SCPH-1001 upside down to get it to read discs properly, I had the DISC READ ERROR on my PS2 fat when I went to run an endurance track on Gran Turismo 3 and it was on the DVD second layer. All the indicia of having eked every last ounce of fun out of a console, I had for those two.
The Nintendo 64 is retro-chic now but it wasn't that popular back then, except for the few games that were nuclear popular: Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 007, Ocarina of Time, and so on. Most of our day-to-day grist came in Playstation-land. On PS1, of course, all the major fighters showed up, and I played truly absurd amounts of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Darkstalkers. But there was plenty more to enjoy on that system, my favorites of which were surely Gran Turismo, Vandal Hearts, and Symphony of the Night. I had a Sega Saturn briefly, but shied away from modding it and ended up selling it on eBay, fight sticks and all. This was a mistake, but ah well.
A few years later I was running my game stores, Wizard's Tower and Arizona Gamer, tales as told right here on The Backstage Pass. As such I was a bit more focused on Magic and didn't deep-dive into Dreamcast, the launch of the PS2, or the Xbox and Gamecube. But I caught up on them fast.
There was a lot going on in PS2-land, especially since it had launch exclusives on all the music games: Dance Dance Revolution, Karaoke Revolution, and a few years later, Guitar Hero. I played a fair amount of other-genre games too, but those were my cocaine. My friend Dalton, who I roomed with for a couple of years, got a Gamecube and we went full tilt on that, and of course Metroid Prime was a revelation. My friend Vince got an Xbox and I was fairly indifferent to it at the time, but I did like its Robotech sims.
Around 2003-2004 I got modded units of Dreamcast and Xbox, and wow had I ever missed a lot of fun. I've spent years after re-acquiring legit copies of those games to keep. We would learn years later that these two systems shared a developer base, and the original Xbox amounted to, in essence, a "Dreamcast 2." The thing that surprised me most were how much both systems overachieved when it came to system performance and catchy, fun games. Blood Wake, Crazy Taxi 2, Soul Calibur, Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Third Strike, Colin McRae, and I even played some Halo 2 despite not being an FPS player.
When the Xbox 360 came along, I was fully in law school and had scant time for gameplay, and was more than content to spend brief leisure on my PS2. The launch of the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 a year later was a study in contrasts: Everyone, but everyone, wanted a Wii, and it was mostly the Sony die-hards who were willing to tolerate a $600 launch price for a new Sony system that had serious developer architecture issues and extensive firmware problems but sure did come with a blu-ray drive. I got married on January 27, 2007 (see? I barely even had to look that up) and we got a Wii from my friend John, which ranked pretty damned high among the wedding gifts. It was an immediate success and I forgot about other video games briefly. Then the Xbox 360 Elite landed, and Vince talked me into it. And I dove in pretty eagerly because I had an HDMI-compatible LCD TV, which was a new and emerging thing at the time, and the 360 was my first source of HD content. I just didn't need a PS3 for anything I could think of, at the time.
So, a cool thing is that you retain your purchase license (the term now used is your "entitlement") to Xbox digital purchases since the beginning, even if the game has been de-listed, provided you don't get your account permabanned by doing something like modding your console. Apple is batting around 90% on this, they do "take things away" sometimes, but as they were the first to bring digital downloads to prominence, Apple can be forgiven; at first their offering was a one-time download on purchase. They pushed the media rightsholders to understand that permanence was essential to get consumers to buy in, and Apple then retroactively granted full entitlements to most early purchases. Nintendo was at the bottom of the heap for the Wii Virtual Console, if you lost it, or changed systems, or whatever, there went your downloads (at the time). Not so on the Xbox 360. Once I had my system stolen in a 2009 house burglary, and was able to recover all my digital games on its replacement, that was a pretty strong hook. When I bought my X-Bone in 2017, everything that was on the backcompat list loaded right up, even 360 purchases from Elite launch day 2007. Hexic. It's still sitting right there. I still play it sometimes.
Anyway, I spent the next few years developing DSG's video game business and having an Xbox One and a Switch as the daily drivers for home video game play. Now, it was time at last for me to see how far the Playstation ecosystem had come since the days of yore when it consisted of everyone's PS2 and whatever discs from that and the PS1 that you had.
One of the issues I was warned about was that ever since PSN started allowing username changes, if you were using the same account on multiple systems (PS3, Vita, PS4) and you made a username change or possibly other account changes, you stood a risk of corrupting your account or system hardware, and Sony could/would only recover it if you had the serial number off the original system you created the account on. Whoa. Well, I don't do too well with hardware permanence these days. Who does? All our stuff is in the cloud. Microsoft's answer in the 360 era was a license transfer. In the XB1 era it's nothing at all. You just designate your new X-Bone as your primary and any previous one you had was, functionally speaking, remote-wiped. Apple? All iCloud.
So realizing I wanted to keep my next PS system around as long as possible, I figured it would be a PS4 Pro, and I wanted to make sure I got the newer revision with the cooler and quieter power supply. And naturally, none of those came in on trade. (None still have.) We have plenty of PS4s in stock, but not that version. Those were only shipped in the Kingdom Hearts special edition and late 2019 core SKUs. I didn't even care that much about the power of the Pro or anything, I just wanted as future-proof a box as available, to avoid account problems that were foreseeable. In time a few decent Vitas (Vitae?) came along, and I have my luxury to pick a PS3 whenever. Was I really going to have to buy a PS4 Pro new? It wouldn't be the worst scenario, but I'm a guy who doesn't mind buying used merch to save a few bucks.
Aaaaaand it finally occurred to me to just make the account on the PSN website directly, on my iMac, that will remain in my family on a desk or table somewhere until it combusts. And which, even if I lost it, I have abundant record of the serial number (surely it wouldn't matter for a computer-made account, but still). And that's if that username bug/glitch/problem even applies to web-created accounts, which it probably doesn't.
And so I created the account. And it was perfect, and took very little time. And I could immediately start wishlisting up games to buy and planning my itinerary. /forehead
After all that concern about planning how to mitigate hardware entropy, I could have just gotten started right from my desk. Ah well, who knew. Now it was time to explore this ecosystem and learn how it works and how it compares.
I trust Microsoft's entitlement permanence more than Sony's, and Sony still does have that 2011 data breach to live down, so multiplatform titles are usually going to be on my XB1S, and later my Series X, or if portability matters, my Switch. But everyone knows Sony's calling card is great exclusives, and I got right on the trolley with flOw to test the account, and it's a relaxing little exclusive game that's well-suited to the Vita.
I picked flOw deliberately because it's a full cross-buy title. I have to hand it to Sony, cross-buy was a welcome greeting, like Xbox Play Anywhere but for up to three systems rather than two (Xbox One and Windows 10 PC). I paid once, and only six bucks for that matter since this was a casual title, and I gained the entitlements for flOw on Vita, PS3, and PS4. That's... a lot of value. Most cross-buy titles support only two of the three systems, but that's still great! By contrast, Nintendo has nothing like this yet, and if I want multiple console entitlements in Xbox Live and I buy a backcompat Xbox 360 title, Microsoft forces me to pick whether it will be assigned to my XB1 or to my 360, and it can't download to both. Only Apple's entitlement multiplier is better: you just get everything on every device, multiple devices per family member. I paid ten bucks for the iOS Minecraft once, and all three kids have it full-blast on their iPads, and Steph and I could even download it if we so desired. Which brings up: Family Sharing.
I haven't yet messed with PSN Family "Management" (Sharing), but I will need to, and it doesn't look too difficult. Right now Apple's implementation is the easiest and most elegant, while still not being what I'd call "easy" in absolute terms. But it works basically exactly as promised and is a strong system of account management, permissions, linked separate profiles, and parental control. Nintendo's solution is comparably easy but not very powerful; you can't even give each kid their own passcode. I have to leave payment methods unsaved on the Nintendo store because otherwise nothing in the software prevents the kids from hitting my credit card to buy content... including pay-to-play crack cocaine stuff that would tempt them to buy without permission from Mom and Dad. There's a workaround involving using the parental controls passcode plus setting screen time to zero, but it proved cumbersome and I turned it off. Microsoft's family sharing is the most difficult I've set up so far, requiring extensive verification and configuration, but it's extremely powerful, and the access management structure gets an A+ without hesitation. So we'll see how the Playstation Family Management stacks up when I've had time to dive in. For that, I probably will wait for my PS4 Pro, because that's what the kids are going to want to play on, and will be needed in any event to manage profiles for physical media games on all three Playstations.
For all this effort, paradoxically, the Playstation-exclusive library is very heavy on game genres I don't play. I drank my fill of first-person shooters in the 1990s and early 2000s on PC. I don't dislike sports games as such, but I don't tend to have the engagement level many of them demand. And the most common of all, the over-the-shoulder 3D open-world action/adventure game? I respect what they are, but I almost always find them tedious. Previous eras saturated me on them and any time I'm playing some new Unreal Engine game, I just can't wait for it to be over and I often quit fairly early. I know most players love those three genres, though, so I try to recognize great games within them and appreciate them on their merits anyway. I prefer platformers (especially Metroidvanias), 2P fighters, rhythm games, auto racing both arcade-style and simulator, 2D shooters, puzzle games, retro arcade collections, the occasional oddball, classic WRPGs and JRPGs, and of course analog (physical) pinball.
And now, if you don't mind, I'm off to buy and sell some Playstation games and gear on behalf of the store... and when I get home, perhaps I'll indulge a bit for myself.
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