An odd twist for Sony fans, that’s for sure.
Sony has had an odd couple of weeks as of late. First they got caught changing some hidden terms of service which enabled a 30 day check for digital games. After being pressured for about a week, Sony made a statement to one outlet that it was due to the refund policy being abused. Then shortly after, Sony lost a court case that will now pay out gamers due to pricing issues with PlayStation store.
Now another apparent issue has come about for PlayStation as the deals section of the PlayStation store is gone for the first time in years. Normally a new season of deals starts shortly before the previous one ends. Typically the sales involve something to do with a current event such as Summer Games Fest, or more recently the Spring sale, which typically leads into the Summer Sale. Another sale was indeed scheduled to start today, just as the previous one ended at midnight, but nothing has appeared in the store.
I even checked the PS Plus catalogue area directly, which lists “exclusive deals” as part of your benefits. Clicking into this page leads to an error of “this content can’t be found.” There are no listed deals anywhere on the PS Plus hub either, and games in my liked list that had a PS Plus discount no longer have it except for one game, Adorable Adventures, which still has the ability to buy it at the PS Plus discounted price. It’s worth noting that pre-order games that have a PS Plus discount still appear to have the discounted price.
In the PlayStation store, the entire deals tab is gone. Several users, including myself, have gotten alerts from the PS App that certain games are “now on sale,” but clicking into the alert leads to the game being full price. This could be a delayed alert from the previous sale, which Sony is known to do, or it could be an outright error as the new sale hasn’t been listed. Finding the deals page direct link on PC, if you still have it saved in your history, leads to the same “this content can’t be found” error.
What could cause this?
It could just be a blatant error that Sony is frantically trying to fix. But it could also mean other things as well.
Last time Sony removed sections from the PS Store, mainly the deals tab, they totally revamped the user interface of the store itself shortly after. Sony could potentially be looking to revamp things a bit, especially with complaints on sorting games, AI slop infested pages, and the inability to look at a game without scrolling all the way back to the top of a search. Sony does have a new PlayStation UI that is currently in beta testing.
Another bad idea is that Sony is further implementing dynamic pricing into the store, which recently impacted sales on various users. The recent examples showed that dynamic pricing was offering vastly different discounts to different users, and nobody could pinpoint exactly what triggered it. Maybe soon we will all be seeing a deals tab in different light?
Or perhaps it has to deal with the ongoing litigation involving Sony’s class action settlement.
Either way, browsing the deals section is actually somewhat enjoyable when I’m bored and it’s pretty lame that it has been gone all day. I do hope it comes down to a simple error or UI adjustment, and Sony is using the time to make the experience better, not worse. But Sony being Sony, no outlet has been able to reach them for comment on what exactly is going on.
