Another major corporation ending another consumer friendly rewards program….
Sony announced via their PlayStation blog that the rewards program for PlayStation gamers is ending this year. The program, named PlayStation Stars, rewarded players via digitally purchases (with PS Plus active) and via in-game campaigns. The campaigns ranged from playing that months free PS Plus titles, to playing selected indie titles, or accomplishing certain achievements.
Players than could take the coins earned from the campaigns and exchange them for either currency used on the PlayStation store, or rather useless digital trinkets. Getting to the app and finding the trinkets players unlocked was rather odd, which is why I call them useless, and Sony never really put effort into intertwining the digital rewards with core profiles. So the overall value comes from unlocking 10 and 20 dollar reward tiers to buy more digital games on the store. Overall it’s a fair value, you could quickly earn enough of a discount to make some new release titles affordable.
Last year PS Stars went down for several weeks with almost no update from Sony about what was causing it. This led to several issues with points expiring by players, but when the service started coming back up there were several regions noting the removal of digital currency options. At the time we had options ranging from 5 to 25, sometimes more, and now there are only options for 10 or 20. This was probably the first sign that Sony was going to remove the program altogether, and fans were fearing this was the case. This was around the same time Sony announced a different rewards program, for buying Sony products, was also ending.
Turn the clock to today and those people were right, PS Stars is ending. Starting today no new members will be accepted, and anyone that opts out of the program will not be allowed to return and will lose all their points. Current members have until July 23rd to accept and complete campaigns to level up their tier, and earn new coins.
After July 23rd the program will no longer refresh new rewards or campaigns. Users will have until November to use their points, if they don’t expire first.
Sony stated on their blog they are utilizing the information from the program to “explore new options” to offer players, but this doesn’t mean much. Sony is in a long list of corporations ending rewards programs, and this one is ending similar to that of Disney’s movie rewards. Disney’s newly “revamped rewards program” is not nearly as good. This also comes off the heels of Sony recently raising the price of PS Plus, which they said was to offer better value….
