Skip to main content

Sony may be experimenting with dynamic pricing for its PlayStation Store

Spider-Man for Playstation

It seems Sony has been experimenting with dynamic pricing across the PlayStation Store, apparently since as early as November of last year, targeting discounts to specific player regions. This is according to the website PSPrices, which has closely tracked trends in Sony’s pricing over time, and it recently reported an increase in the number of games undergoing dynamic pricing. 

In 68 regions and across 139 games, including first-party AAA titles like God of War, Spider-Man, HELLDIVERS 2, and Stellar Blade, Sony offered average discounts ranging from just over 5 percent at the low end to nearly 18 percent at the high end. PSPrices even discovered that personalized discounts were being offered, with some lucky accounts receiving a massive 56 percent off the regular price of the popular Helldivers 2 game.

SEE ALSO: Sony’s first clip-style buds sound fabulous, but is that enough to justify their price?

Currently, both the United States and Japan are exempt from the experiment, likely due to stricter market regulations, but that still means that millions of customers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa

If Sony embraces dynamic pricing across the board, it may also seek to selectively raise prices on its most popular or in-demand titles, a practice known as "surge pricing." Furthermore, learning that one player in a gaming lobby paid full price for a game while another player from a different country received a 50 percent discount may not sit well with some gamers, and is likely to provoke some backlash if or when the dynamic pricing policy becomes standard store-wide.

As of this writing, Sony has not publicly commented on the experiment. At a time of economic uncertainty and general consumer anxiety, gaming companies have faced heightened scrutiny over their pricing, so it will be interesting to see whether they move forward with dynamic pricing.



from Mashable https://ift.tt/zf26heW
https://ift.tt/bN2vL7r
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the clocks change for Daylight Saving Time, and why we do it at all

The clocks on our smartphones do something bizarre twice a year: One day in the spring, they jump ahead an hour, and our alarms go off an hour sooner. We wake up bleary-eyed and confused until we remember what just happened. Afterward, "Daylight Saving Time" becomes the norm for about eight months (And yes, it's called "Daylight Saving" not "Daylight Savings." I don't make the rules). Then, in the fall, the opposite happens. Our clocks set themselves back an hour, and we wake up refreshed, if a little uneasy.  Mild chaos ensues at both annual clock changes. What feels like an abrupt and drastic lengthening or shortening of the day causes time itself to seem fictional. Babies and dogs demand that their old sleep and feeding habits remain unchanged. And more consequential effects — for better or worse — may be involved as well (more on which in a minute). Changing our clocks is an all-out attack on our perception of time as an immutable law of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A speeding black hole is birthing baby stars across light years

Astronomers think they have discovered a supermassive black hole traveling away from its home galaxy at 4 million mph — so fast it's not doing what it's notorious for: sucking light out of the universe. Quite the opposite, possibly. Rather than ripping stars to shreds and swallowing up every morsel, this black hole is believed to be fostering new star formation, leaving a trail of newborn stars stretching 200,000 light-years through space . Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomy professor at Yale University, said as the black hole rams into gas, it seems to trigger a narrow corridor of new stars, where the gas has a chance to cool. How exactly it works, though, isn't known, said van Dokkum, who led research on the phenomenon captured by NASA 's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally. A paper on the findings was published last week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . “What we’re seeing is the aftermath," he said in a statement . "Like the wake behind a ship, we’r...
Post a Comment
Read more