Why PlayStation locks you up in your own account?
There are a lot of situations that would make you want to change the country for a given account and during the last year I had to go through many of them as I moved from Argentina to Ireland, and let me tell you it’s not as easy as one would expect.
Shutting down an account and creating a new one is not a big deal, but not being able to carry everything you’ve done (Trophies and other stuff) it’s a huge pain in the ass, and more if that means loosing all your team in your FIFA Ultimate Team and similar games. I don’t want o resign to all my achievements (?)
The Problem: what happened?
After moving to Ireland, I continued to use the services I had, such as Spotify, Netflix and among other my Play Station Network subscription. This subscription that many of us pay in yearly basis, it’s our connection to million of other online players that we meet for different games and we spend quite a good amount of hours in.
When I had to renew my subscription this year, and after I’ve decided to switch any service linked to an Argentinian payment to one in Ireland I encounter this sad news. The process for setting up a new payment mechanism to your PSN account it’s pretty easy, you can load up all the information from your credit card but when you have to provide some of your billing account you might realise that you can’t change the country… oh oh.
They will not let me pay with a credit card that is not from the country where I originally created the account… if you’re not going to let me do that at least let me change the country, how hard could it be?
The PlayStation fix…
Searching in Google this quickly surfaced that there was going to be an issue with this. The definitive answer might be at the PlayStation customer support site, not happy with the reasons or excuses why this is not possible:
- PlayStation Store content from other regions may not be compatible with your PlayStation system region code and would mean that you cannot download your purchases.
- Downloadable game add-ons are region locked, so if you have a disc from a country other than the country in which your account was created you will find that you cannot download DLC for that title from PlayStation Store in your country.
- Content may not be available in your language in another country’s PlayStation Store.
- You can only view videos purchased or rented in the country in which your account was created due to either licensing or certification restrictions.
- There could be authorisation problems with using credit or debit cards.
- You would experience difficulty using PlayStation Network top up vouchers.
All the reason listed above can be warning, a sight a decision to left to the user when trying to change his account to a different country. In my personal opinion or you lock the content, or you lock the payment system, why do both?
Trophies, content and your online ID cannot be transferred to or duplicated on your new account. We are sorry if this is the cause of any disappointment.
I’m not ready to give up everything, even when realising that is a use case the don’t want to implement rather than actually something they can’t do. According to Wikipedia, PSN has currently 70 million current monthly users, and I bet that not many of them are relocating from one country to the other but nevertheless I believe that is something that should not be that complicated.
Conclusion?
Companies won’t fix something they don’t want to fix, even if it’s not hard. I know I’m a complicated customer and I believe that as time goes by companies will have to be aware of their customer and solved the issues as feedback is a b***. It’s not even something impossible to do, and I had a really good experience with my Apple Store account, based on the location of your payment system the Store you can access and than can be handled easier that over complicated processes and giving everything up. If I’ve been able to buy games in Europe and use them with no problem what would be the issue of changing my account location?
