Last week Sony announced it would no longer include pricing information on its PlayStation Blog posts relating to store updates and sales, with users now required to click through to the store to discover information accurate to their region.

That’s how the blog post left it, but an update posted yesterday evening explained why this change has been made.

The statement reads: “It’s a change we’ve made for a reason, and I want to offer you a bit more background on what that is.

“Here at SCEE, we cater for a huge number of territories across Europe and beyond, many of which use different currencies. In fact, we cater for about 20 different currencies across more than 30 countries. We’re both legally and ethically obliged not to be misleading in our communications, and by only listing prices in, say, £ and €, we are potentially giving gamers in territories who do not use those currencies a false impression of the cost of an item.

“So we’re left with two options: either publish every currency price for every item, or ask you to click through to PlayStation Store to see an accurate local price, which is generated automatically based on your ISP’s location.

“If you were to take a typical PlayStation Store promotion featuring around 100 discounted items, the blog post would have to feature around 2,000 separate prices to be compliant. That would not only be impractical to create, but it would also make the blog post very difficult to read.

“Duly, we’ve made the difficult decision to remove pricing information and ask you to click through to PlayStation Store.”

Another solution suggested by the PlayStation userbase was to pull in local pricing to the blog based on your ISP/PSN ID, much like the store does.

“Yes, this is a sensible suggestion, and a more sophisticated ‘logged in’ experience is certainly on our shopping list,” explained Sony. “That said, unfortunately it’s not quite as straightforward as a click of the fingers – it’s a significant undertaking with fairly wide ramifications. In short, it’s not something we’ll be able to facilitate in the short-term. But further out, maybe!”

Sceptics may look at the change as a way for Sony to get more users onto its store, where they are more likely to buy items. We, however, reckon the reasons for removing pricing seem pretty fair.

Source: EU PS Blog