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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
Welcome to the final GameDiscoverCo newsletter of the week, since we’ve stored ‘like a billion’ interesting links in our newsletter template. And now we have to disgorge them, like a squirrel unhiding its nuts from a tree trunk. (Totally like that.)
Before we get started, just wanted to point out this video interview with me on game discoverability as part of a mini-series by Rocket Jump Events over on the Etch Play YouTube channel. I talk about how people find your games! Some of you care about that! Go check it out…
The new PlayStation (web) store gets.. mixed reviews
Ahead of the PlayStation 5’s launch, Sony has rolled out a brand new web version of the PlayStation Store, which definitely needed an upgrade. (Though the removal of digital support for older Sony platforms is not always popular.)
There’s a very long ResetEra forum thread (which started before the store was available to all) including a lot of good/interesting player feedback in it. Thus far, it seems like the design is way cleaner and mobile friendly.
But there’s a number of obvious usability & discovery issues with the new version of the store, which is ‘bare bones’ in a variety of ways. I thought Toumari’s ResetEra comments (scroll down to post #200) were fair and helpful. Some of the suggestion headings - which he goes into more detail on - are as follows:
"Add titles below the thumbnails on the category view... Make it obvious what is DLC and what is a game... Show DLC of a game on their respective pages... Add filters on the category/search pages... Show details about the different game editions."
In addition, he noted some of the features that are missing in the new store that were included in the old store: "No screenshots/gameplay videos on the game pages, No download file-size listed on the game pages, No wishlist support, Can no longer add games/products to the cart from the list views."
I’m sure the store will be a work in progress. And it’s unclear how closely its usability or layout mirrors that of the PlayStation 5 UI itself, since the UI demos so far haven’t looked closely at the PlayStation Store. But there’s clearly some work to be done here that will help more people buy games, if correctly addressed.
New perspectives on genre viability
The subject of Steam/game genre tags and viability has come up a lot recently. So kudos to Chris Zukowski for his latest article/newsletter, which includes this gem of a graph:
Read the Original Article on Source Page
#Gamasutra #Simon #Carlesss #Blog #PlayStations #web #store #genre #viability
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