Living in South America and being ignored by almost every game developer out there is just one of the struggles of being not only a LatAm (Latin American) gamer, but a game journalist as well. Luckily these kind of situations are being slowly remedied, at least to some extent.
For example, there’s a Latin American presser on E3, right after the International one, but unfortunately it rarely gets any coverage. In case you missed any of these events, the localizations of some of the Playstation Stores get announced and that’s about it.
Now that I reflect on the subject, no wonder it gets close to no coverage.
It’s safe to assume that Sony won the hearts of almost every consumer in the region by simply announcing that the Playstation 4 will launch alongside the European market, showing their ‘support’ towards the continent.
But is this nothing more than a PR stunt?
The local Xbox Live vs Playstation Network debate:
Digital content will play a major role in this upcoming generation and while Xbox came into the country with a fully functional Xbox Live Experience, we yet have to see a complete experience on Sony Devices. Services like Playstation Plus are nowhere to be found, and Sony officials refused to comment on an estimated release date for such a key service. But there’s a bigger issue, one that Sony wasn’t able to fix in the past five months, and that is the ability to use any credit card to make a purchase.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you are a Latin American resident in either Argentina or Chile. The credit card that you use to buy your games in either digital or brick and mortar stores is not valid. As you heard, credit cards emitted in Argentina or Chile, even if they are authorized to buy in any store such as Steam, Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Zavvi, Game UK, Xbox Live (any region) won't allow you to make a single purchase in either the Argentinian or Chilean PSN.
Pricing is another huge problem that they weren’t able to fix. For this article I picked a random game, Metro Last Light, both available for digital downloads. Xbox Live uses local currencies and while overpriced (550 Argentinian pesos or 96 American dollars for the full game) there’s no tax to be applied here. The PSN option is 6 bucks cheaper, $89.99, but since this is an international transaction, there’s a 20 percent tax to be applied, so it ends up being 11 dollars more expensive. Weirdly enough retail is way cheaper than the digital counterpart, even on day one releases.
Let’s recap: Lack of PSN Plus, use of local credit cards and Sony stores do not sell PSN Cards, plus ridiculous pricing (Just in case you were wondering, the only reason why the PSN and XBLA games have a +50% “tax” is in order to not cannibalize sales of the retail market).
Lack of Press, Preorders, Hardware pricing:
Even with this grim forecast, the forecast is that Argentina will remain a Sony Territory. Being the first on the market - The Xbox One is rumored to make an unofficial launch in December, followed by the official reveal in January - and with a cheaper price point, the Playstation 4 is much more appealing than the Xbox One.
Update: Sony Argentina announced today that the PS4 will be the equivalent to one-thousand US dollars. You can pre-order one of the ten available units at launch, with a grand total of 17% of the entire catalogue at your disposal.
That's absurd, and clearly not what they are advertising.
Historical Lack of Support for their First Party:
It’s hard enough to work as a journalist when Sony Argentina decides to localize 17% of their yearly catalogue. On a great year, their average is close to 10% and that’s only counting their AAA or retail releases. Sony's launch window won’t be as strong as the world imagined. From the entire list, a lot of their content will available on both Playstation 3 and Playstation 4.Killzone: Shadowfall will be most likely be localized, and we highly doubt thatKnack will be on the release list (Vita was launched on August 2012 with only 4 localized titles).
So what’s SONY’s angle?
After a disastrous Worldwide Playstation 3 launch, their PR team was as sharp as possible. They saw that Microsoft won’t be able to launch on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and Peru, but the problem is that today Sony isn’t fit to launch on these 9 regions, making the 32 countries launch a PR hoax rather than a marketing strategy.
On the other side of the road, Microsoft will launch on Brazil on release date, and we will be able to freely import and use Brazilian servers, on what we call “an unofficial release” and eventually used the 100 localized servers that will be available on the official launch with all the existing benefits of using a marketplace that actually works with our billing system.
Simply put, the worldwide Sony launch is a PR stunt, put in place to make themselves look as if they have taken the high road. It's too bad that high road they are on is paved with the gold of Latin American gamers.
struggle link
God damn stfu with this shyt. You STAY saying that in every post as if it absolves you of any biases.