Sony, don’t you want my money?

Posted by admin on March 24th, 2014

I bought a PS4 when it released but I’ve not played it much, a bit of Shadowfall and that’s all. I was reading a review of MGS 5: Ground Zeroes and thought it would probably be a game (demo maybe) that I’d like. Digital Foundry did a comparison and their verdict was that the PS4 version was the best.

So I booted up the PS4 and went to have a look on PSN to see if the game was available and a sensible price. £24.99 is pretty good, pricing on Amazon is just a couple of quid less and that’s not too bad considering some of the online prices for both PS4 and Xbox One but that’s a rant for another time.

Now I have to admit here that I am much more of a Microsoft console user than a Sony one. I always used to be a fan of Sony and had an original PS1 but I had a really bad experience with their online service a few years ago. I owned a PSP, one of the earlier versions where the games came on UMD but I sold it when I was having a clear out. I then got a PSP GO after watching someone talking about them on YouTube and saying how much fun they were because they were easy to hack. I thought this sounded like good fun so I bought a decent one on ebay. The PSP Go is digital distribution only which meant that I had to set up a Sony account and buy games for it on PSN.

At this time I must have been quite used to Xbox Live and I never had a problem with that service when paying online. The points system worked well I guess but you still had to pay for them and could use your credit card which always worked for me. Sony have always used a cash system and you add money to your wallet using a credit card. Using my PSP GO I tried many times to add cash to my wallet using my credit card but I never ever got it to work. I discovered that you could buy cards to add cash to your wallet which is what I did. A few weeks later I rang my credit card company to ask them about something else and while talking to customer services they asked me about the twenty plus attempts to take one pound from my card.

It turned out that even though the PSP had told me my credit card withdrawals all failed my credit card company had actually allowed every single one through but that they had never actually been completed. So Sony had tried and succeeded to validate my credit card but never allowed any of my transactions to complete.

I was really angry because I’d spoken to Sony and they had been completely unable to help me. I was so angry in fact that I tried to cancel my account (it seems like it’s impossible) and sold my PSP GO back on ebay. Shortly afterwards Sony had their epic privacy fail as well, my account was one of the thousands impacted and to be honest the whole experience put me right off Sony’s online platform. I became a strict Microsoft console user.

So I was hoping that they might have got their act together when I bought my PS4 but of course not, my first attempt to add funds to my wallet has failed. I won’t be trying again and I will be spending as little money as possible on their platform.

P.S. I’ve read a few more reviews of MGS 5: Ground Zeroes and I probably won’t be wasting money on it; I think I just wanted to play something on the PS4. Come on Sony get your act together.

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