At Paris Games Week in France, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida was asked when will PlayStation users get the chance to change their names? Yoshida responded with, “When? I wish I knew,” he said in a Twitter video.
PlayStation fans have long requested the ability to change their names like their Xbox rivals. Xbox users can change their Gamertags once, no charge, within the first 30 days of creating an account. If at any time they would like to change their Gamertag after that first time, it costs $10.
Yoshida assures that their engineers are trying to see what they can do – but Shawn Layden, Sony Computer Entertainment America president and CEO, stated to IGN that it has not happened to stop the threat of abuse:
“[We want to do name changing] in a way that’s transparent, but also don’t let people morph themselves, either,” he said. “And yeah, it’s terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I hate that we have to do that. So we’re trying to balance that between… the 99 percent of users going to have a good experience, how can we help make that happen without giving one more tool to the bad actor to go in and ruin the experience for others?”
A recent survey (invite-only) asked players to rate their most wanted features in the next big PS4 update. Some of the features listed included wishlists, avatars, folders, PSN ID, etc.
What do you think Sony could do so that they can allow its users to change their ID’s without trolls abusing the system? Would you pay to change your PSN name? Voice your opinion in the comments below.
