Back in April, we reported that Sony was considering allowing players to change their PSN names. However, it has been a bit unclear why users aren’t allowed to do so, with many assuming that it’s down to technical challenges. However, Sony Computer Entertainment America’s President and CEO, Shawn Layden, seems to have a different take on the issue.
Speaking to IGN, Layden hinted that the reason Sony isn’t allowing players to change their PSN names is the risk of abuse that may result from it.
The road map for feature extension is very long. It goes from here to Hangzhou in China. And all of those things are on there. Yeah, we want to give you more control across your experience and your profile and your presence on the network. At the same time, as you’ll understand, we don’t want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that.
Layden went on to say that Sony wants to allow people to change their PSN names in a way that ensures transparency and doesn’t allow people to “morph” themselves.
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?
Do you agree with Sony’s stance on PSN name changes? Let us know.
[Source: IGN]
