The Play Station physical games debacle is taking over everything Sony does — it’s the biggest tech PR disaster since Sonos’ app update, so will Sony learn the lessons that turned Sonos around? | Tech Radar

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The Play Station physical games debacle is taking over everything Sony does — it’s the biggest tech PR disaster since Sonos’ app update, so will Sony learn the lessons that turned Sonos around?

Play Station gamers are furious and they're making that plain on Sony's socials. Will Sony do a Sonos and eat humble pie?

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GTA 6 won't be available on physical disks: retail copies will have a download code. (Image credit: Future)

Sony's social media team are having a rough week: anything they post is getting piled on by angry gamers who are outraged by Sony's plans to stop the production of game discs.

Many Play Station owners are vowing to boycott the Play Station Store, cancel their Play Station Plus membership and never buy Play Station products again.

It's a PR nightmare for sure, with pretty much any online Play Station content becoming a place for gamers to protest, derailing any attempt to talk about anything else.

It reminds me of the response to Sonos' introduction of a new and hugely flawed app, which Sonos now admits was badly done.

Sonos' PR nightmare lasted for around 18 months, there is now optimism and rebuilt trust around the new changes it's bringing to improve the app. Could Sony learn from Sonos' experience and its attempts to rebuild customer trust?

The end of physical game copies is coming, and retailers are not happy

Analysts say that 'digital is just too lucrative' for Sony and that Play Station 'will not reverse' its decision to end physical disc production even in the face of fans cancelling PS Plus subscriptions

'No way THIS is the first tweet Play Station puts out after 6 days' — Instead of responding to the physical disc controversy, Play Station is trying to advertise its new fight stick as fans refuse to back down

I think the answer is: yes it could, but no it won't.

Speaking to Tech Radar earlier this year, Sonos CEO Tom Conrad set out his views on how to try and make angry customers happy again. "You just have to show up in people's life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you put people through."

Sonos CEO Tom Conrad admits Sonos got it wrong and has been working hard to regain customers' trust through direct communication and carefully targeting what's being worked on (Image credit: Sonos / Future Publishing Ltd)

So far, Sony isn't doing that: rather than respond to gamers' concerns, it's battening down the hatches and staying silent about its move to digital-only. And that's a shame, because there are genuine reasons for gamers to worry about Sony's decision.

There are three key concerns about digital-only. The first, and I think the most important, is cost. The Play Station Store is ludicrously expensive: for example Spider-Man 2, a three-year-old game, is £69.99 digital today in the UK, where I'm based. Competition between retailers means it's around £37 on disc.

The second is second-hand gaming. I buy many games second-hand, and many gamers like to sell their games after they've completed them or got annoyed by them, so that they can spend what they recoup on more new games (a win for the industry overall). So I can buy Returnal for about £20 on e Bay. I can't buy the digital edition second-hand, so if I want the digital version it's… you guessed it, £69.99.

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To be fair, you can get both games, and others, on Play Station Plus Extra. But not everyone wants or can sustain yet another subscription, and we know that all subscription services go up in price — often dramatically so, as we saw with Xbox Game Pass last year.

And the third is ownership. Sony's disc announcement came just days after it deleted customers' purchased copies of over 500 movies, making it clear that purchasing doesn't mean owning forever. And those movies cost a lot less than £69.99.

Sony may have to eat humble pie for a while in order to mimic Sonos here, seeking out customer views to talk about those concerns, and maybe thinking about how to address them — so for example it could tell us that digital codes would still be sold through multiple retailers, like Nintendo does with its key cards, or that we'd be able to resell our digital-only games (even if it hasn't developed the mechanism for this yet).

However, the reality is that for a firm the size of Sony, even a significant customer backlash such as 246,586 signatures on a petition represents a microscopic proportion of its 125 million Play Station Plus subscribers, let alone the many more Play Station owners — and it can afford to ignore them.

That's something of a gamble. Just ask Microsoft, whose Game Pass price hike scared off far more customers than expected — according to reports, it lost 4 million out of 34 million Game Pass subscribers when it was expecting huge growth instead, forcing a partial reversal.

But Sony's gaming business is far bigger, and that means it can still upset a lot of customers without feeling much pain.

I suspect Sony is going to take a different lesson from the Sonos situation: even at the height of customer anger, Sonos still sold lots of speakers, soundbars and subs.

Then again, maybe Sony is more rattled than it's currently letting on. Two days after the digital-only announcement, with customers raging online, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki sold more than half of his Sony stock and Sony's chief strategy officer unloaded a bunch of Sony shares too.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.

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