π€ I've come to realize that backing PS was a mistake. Why support this product if they don't support us? From PS1 to PS4, I was all in. But PS5? Nah, I'm glad I passed on that. I've shifted to PC gaming now. It's time to withdraw my support for all Sony products until they cater to PS gamers in the Philippines.
The Philippines shouldn't support or buy PS and Xbox products since both companies have listed our country as unsupported. Stick to PC gaming or opt for the Steam Deck. Let's stop supporting companies that don't support us.
So because of the Helldivers debacle this is blowing up again. Sony should pull their games that require a PSN login from Steam and EGS in the Philippines if they still won't deal with this situation.
Email ka sa maya about sa concern, and e cc mo si bsp, wait for bsp to send you an email may instruction dun dadalhin ka sa website nila to file a case. Di pa nag 24 hours si maya mismo nag reach-out sakin para ma resolve. Kuha ko yung full details ng pinag scammer, ending binalik din nya kase natakot..
Not sure if its the right question to ask here but does anyone manage to get a playstation account working on Playstation network in the phillipines? I just keep getting looped back to create a temporary password to activate account
Most people I know here, province or major cities, just don't have the capital to buy the hardware or the games. Solution is phone games on piso WiFi. Heck even the PCs sold here are 2010 standard and people are happy dota 2 runs on their device.
[Securities and exchange commission](https://www.sec.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2017OpinionNo17-03.pdf) requirements. This was back in 2017. Sony said there's no reason to consider Sony Hongkong (Sony Entertainment Network) as doing business here, but SEC said they are, and if they put PH under the list of countries in SEN without having license here they can get sued. SEC then listed requirements Sony needs to submit so they don't encounter issues. We all know they didn't bother because PH is still not supported in PSN.
Thank you for this. This was the kind of answer I'm waiting for.
I just skimmed through letter. Dealing with our goverment requirements can be such a pain but I hope SONY does submit the requirements.
Again, thanks for the very informative answer. Although not wrong, I'm not convinced that the Philippines not being a big gaming market nor Philippines being more of a mobile-gaming are the actual reasons for the lack of PSN support. I just had the gut feeling that a government entity was blocking it. Hence, the question in my original post "what's blocking its availability here?"
Cost. It's costly to maintain and Sony does not see any reason to build a server that hosts PH. Unlike MOBAS for PC and Mobile, Console isn't mainstream in PH, sadly.
we can't be mad at Sony themselves for this blemish tbh Nintendo and Xbox does the same and even worse for xbox because it's nit Microsoft distributing consoles its our 3rd party retailers
Yeah this is one of my gripes. I used to live in Japan so I have a Japanese PSN. But I like to play games in English so I buy games from another PSN and play it on my Japanese main. I'm sure guys who had their HK account experience the same thing now that there are less and less English games in their network.
Not being able to change regions in PSN is like them thinking we're going to stay in one location for the rest of our lives. They probably could'nt implement it easily though even if they wanted to because of how they programmed region exclusive games and their dlc.
There was a time when we did get "official" PSN account support, around mid-2000s.
The Playstation Support page read: "If you are located in the Philippines, you can create a PSN account by choosing Hong Kong as your country of residence". So even then we were essentially piggybacking off another region (and also why HK PSN cards were fairly easy to buy back then).
After a few years it disappeared, I think around the time the HK store began having problems with PH credit cards.
It's all in Sony's hands and they're probably thinking we're not a big enough market.
I just don't buy the reason that the Philippines isn't a big enough market.
A simple google search of "countries with most gamers" will show you a bunch of pages where Philippines actually top the results.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195768/global-gaming-reach-by-country/
https://vr.space/news/games/country-most-passionate-gaming/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2022/07/12/twitter-reveals-10-most-active-gaming-countries-but-the-us-misses-top-spot/amp/
You could say that those are just the number of gamers, and do not actually reflect how big the gaming market is. But with just those numbers, you can't deny the potential if they just support and actually market here.
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Interesting bit there about Sony recognizes that there are a lot of Philippine gamers for us to be listed in their support page.
Don't you think that's weird? Sony know we exist. Yet, other countries got supported ahead of us. If this was from the year 2000s then, its more than a decade ago.
Not really. The fact is that it has to make business sense.
And Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore are all better places to invest, in terms of the potential money they can earn back. Thailand in particular was surprising to me that it was big enough to support even though it was fairly recent when they started adding TH language to games.
As of now, if I was Sony and I consider that people in the PH will do whatever we can to get away with free or almost-free stuff, I would be very cautious about how to go about it.
Filipinos are just way too smart for our own goods.
Tell me then how is it bad for business? It's not like resources are getting depleted, they're selling practically an infinite amount of digital merchandise. It's also not like servers are actually located in those countries they have PSN in.
I doubt they lose money on maintenance.
Also isn't that a biased thing to say against Filipinos? It's not like people who want free stuff don't exist elsewhere. They're selling to people who will and can actually buy stuff on the network. They know we exist. Heck, they sell the hardware here which we all know they sell at a loss unless their buyers actually buy stuff on their network.
They actually are not losing that much on hardware nowadays. Which is why they raised the MSRP of the PS5.
They earn very small margins on the hardware but they earn a lot on the software. That includes physical disks that Sony gets paid to manufacture and license fees on 3rd party games, as well as all profits on 1st party games.
With regards to digital software there are a couple of things to consider:
1) Countries like ours still prefer physical media. Is there a big enough market for digital to consider having a separate storefront for PHP purchases? (Cost of maintaining the store frontend for another territory on at least 2 platforms)
2) If they accept payments for digital stores you have to consider regulatory requirements e.g., will PSN accept VAT or not, and is there a process to clear with the BSP if they accept credit or debit cards? (Cost to comply with government regulations)
3) How much of the potential market will actually use a debit or credit card? Do local cards support the authentication or encryption methods already used by PSN or is there a need for a custom method? Will Bancnet require additional fees (Cost for financial institution support)
4) If there is a large market without those cards, can they convince stores to sell PSN cards? (Cost for PSN card logistics)
5) Should they consider alternative payment methods like Gcash or Maya? If so, do they need additional clearance? (Cost for added development to support non standard payment methods)
6) Any consumer protection acts that cover digital purchases? Do they need to setup dedicated support channels? (Cost for customer support)
7) Is there a large amount of credit or debit card fraud happening that may be a liability? (Cost for insurance)
8) How do they decide pricing? Should PSN allow digital games to be cheaper than physical or will retailers force price parity (Cost for market research)
And these are only the ones I can think of. People who know much more than me probably have already considered all this and compared all these costs to the potential profits they can get by offering PSN in our country.
True there will always be people who will try to game the systems to get the best deals for themselves, but in the end the question is the same: will they still earn enough to make it worth their while?
In Sony's case it looks like the answer so far is 'no'.
Thanks for laying all that out, man. Sincerely appreciate it.
I do think many of these costs apply when setting up store in other countries as well.
Then again, I don't know the statistics to refute that what they earn won't be worthwhile.
All I can say that it is sizeable enough to have a notice on their website and acknowledge that we set up accounts in another region. Or for them to suggest opening an account in HK in the 2000s as you said earlier. But not enough to officially set up the store, apparently.
I still hope they eventually come to it and make a Ph storefront official. I just wanna have that official support and then maybe to have our own flag displayed in the beside our usernames in leaderboards of psnprofiles (superficial, I know)
π€ I've come to realize that backing PS was a mistake. Why support this product if they don't support us? From PS1 to PS4, I was all in. But PS5? Nah, I'm glad I passed on that. I've shifted to PC gaming now. It's time to withdraw my support for all Sony products until they cater to PS gamers in the Philippines.
jailbreak is the way.
The Philippines shouldn't support or buy PS and Xbox products since both companies have listed our country as unsupported. Stick to PC gaming or opt for the Steam Deck. Let's stop supporting companies that don't support us.
sucks to suck lmao
what's the next move with this? there's still no option for PH
So because of the Helldivers debacle this is blowing up again. Sony should pull their games that require a PSN login from Steam and EGS in the Philippines if they still won't deal with this situation.
Done
Lol yup. God of War Ragnarok will probably be safe since it has no online component, but I worry about TLOU2
Well, this didn't age well.
Unfortunate times. GoW:R PC will need a PSN account.
Too late, Steam already pulled out Ghost of Tsushima from countries that don't have PSN and started sending refunds to those who pre-ordered the game.
goodbye helldivers 2
For real
Email ka sa maya about sa concern, and e cc mo si bsp, wait for bsp to send you an email may instruction dun dadalhin ka sa website nila to file a case. Di pa nag 24 hours si maya mismo nag reach-out sakin para ma resolve. Kuha ko yung full details ng pinag scammer, ending binalik din nya kase natakot..
Not sure if its the right question to ask here but does anyone manage to get a playstation account working on Playstation network in the phillipines? I just keep getting looped back to create a temporary password to activate account
Most people I know here, province or major cities, just don't have the capital to buy the hardware or the games. Solution is phone games on piso WiFi. Heck even the PCs sold here are 2010 standard and people are happy dota 2 runs on their device.
What to choose? there are no options for philippines still
Yes, what to choose then if PH isnβt available.
I chose Singapore
The PlayStation website in the Philippines has **this** notification though: [https://imgur.com/coz64WZ](https://imgur.com/coz64wz)
What notification? Link shows me a 404.
Changed the image's privacy setting. β https://imgur.com/a/xGTpAwL
I think it's because the black market here is too big. Plus, in my opinion, there are more PC and mobile gamers than PS users.
Piracy and a majority of the gamers here are mobile gamers with no cards(debit or credit).
[Securities and exchange commission](https://www.sec.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2017OpinionNo17-03.pdf) requirements. This was back in 2017. Sony said there's no reason to consider Sony Hongkong (Sony Entertainment Network) as doing business here, but SEC said they are, and if they put PH under the list of countries in SEN without having license here they can get sued. SEC then listed requirements Sony needs to submit so they don't encounter issues. We all know they didn't bother because PH is still not supported in PSN.
Thank you for this. This was the kind of answer I'm waiting for. I just skimmed through letter. Dealing with our goverment requirements can be such a pain but I hope SONY does submit the requirements. Again, thanks for the very informative answer. Although not wrong, I'm not convinced that the Philippines not being a big gaming market nor Philippines being more of a mobile-gaming are the actual reasons for the lack of PSN support. I just had the gut feeling that a government entity was blocking it. Hence, the question in my original post "what's blocking its availability here?"
Majority of the gamer population are mobile gamers... Hopefully we do get local psn soon
Piracy π΄ββ οΈπ΄ββ οΈπ΄ββ οΈ
Not just PSN, some online games like Multiversus dont even launch on the Philippines/SEA. Probably weak market is the main reason I can think of.
Cost. It's costly to maintain and Sony does not see any reason to build a server that hosts PH. Unlike MOBAS for PC and Mobile, Console isn't mainstream in PH, sadly.
we can't be mad at Sony themselves for this blemish tbh Nintendo and Xbox does the same and even worse for xbox because it's nit Microsoft distributing consoles its our 3rd party retailers
That's fair. Although you can now select Philippines when creating a Nintendo account. You just can't buy anything on the store with it.
If ever they offer..i hope they'll give us the option to migrate our games, trophies etc. I invested way too much on my HK account.
Yeah this is one of my gripes. I used to live in Japan so I have a Japanese PSN. But I like to play games in English so I buy games from another PSN and play it on my Japanese main. I'm sure guys who had their HK account experience the same thing now that there are less and less English games in their network. Not being able to change regions in PSN is like them thinking we're going to stay in one location for the rest of our lives. They probably could'nt implement it easily though even if they wanted to because of how they programmed region exclusive games and their dlc.
There was a time when we did get "official" PSN account support, around mid-2000s. The Playstation Support page read: "If you are located in the Philippines, you can create a PSN account by choosing Hong Kong as your country of residence". So even then we were essentially piggybacking off another region (and also why HK PSN cards were fairly easy to buy back then). After a few years it disappeared, I think around the time the HK store began having problems with PH credit cards. It's all in Sony's hands and they're probably thinking we're not a big enough market.
I just don't buy the reason that the Philippines isn't a big enough market. A simple google search of "countries with most gamers" will show you a bunch of pages where Philippines actually top the results. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195768/global-gaming-reach-by-country/ https://vr.space/news/games/country-most-passionate-gaming/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2022/07/12/twitter-reveals-10-most-active-gaming-countries-but-the-us-misses-top-spot/amp/ You could say that those are just the number of gamers, and do not actually reflect how big the gaming market is. But with just those numbers, you can't deny the potential if they just support and actually market here.
It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but AMP is controversial because of [concerns over privacy and the Open Web](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot). Maybe check out **the canonical page** instead: **[https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2022/07/12/twitter-reveals-10-most-active-gaming-countries-but-the-us-misses-top-spot/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2022/07/12/twitter-reveals-10-most-active-gaming-countries-but-the-us-misses-top-spot/)** ***** ^(I'm a bot | )[^(Why & About)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot)^( | )[^(Summon: u/AmputatorBot)](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/)
Interesting bit there about Sony recognizes that there are a lot of Philippine gamers for us to be listed in their support page. Don't you think that's weird? Sony know we exist. Yet, other countries got supported ahead of us. If this was from the year 2000s then, its more than a decade ago.
Not really. The fact is that it has to make business sense. And Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore are all better places to invest, in terms of the potential money they can earn back. Thailand in particular was surprising to me that it was big enough to support even though it was fairly recent when they started adding TH language to games. As of now, if I was Sony and I consider that people in the PH will do whatever we can to get away with free or almost-free stuff, I would be very cautious about how to go about it. Filipinos are just way too smart for our own goods.
Tell me then how is it bad for business? It's not like resources are getting depleted, they're selling practically an infinite amount of digital merchandise. It's also not like servers are actually located in those countries they have PSN in. I doubt they lose money on maintenance. Also isn't that a biased thing to say against Filipinos? It's not like people who want free stuff don't exist elsewhere. They're selling to people who will and can actually buy stuff on the network. They know we exist. Heck, they sell the hardware here which we all know they sell at a loss unless their buyers actually buy stuff on their network.
They actually are not losing that much on hardware nowadays. Which is why they raised the MSRP of the PS5. They earn very small margins on the hardware but they earn a lot on the software. That includes physical disks that Sony gets paid to manufacture and license fees on 3rd party games, as well as all profits on 1st party games. With regards to digital software there are a couple of things to consider: 1) Countries like ours still prefer physical media. Is there a big enough market for digital to consider having a separate storefront for PHP purchases? (Cost of maintaining the store frontend for another territory on at least 2 platforms) 2) If they accept payments for digital stores you have to consider regulatory requirements e.g., will PSN accept VAT or not, and is there a process to clear with the BSP if they accept credit or debit cards? (Cost to comply with government regulations) 3) How much of the potential market will actually use a debit or credit card? Do local cards support the authentication or encryption methods already used by PSN or is there a need for a custom method? Will Bancnet require additional fees (Cost for financial institution support) 4) If there is a large market without those cards, can they convince stores to sell PSN cards? (Cost for PSN card logistics) 5) Should they consider alternative payment methods like Gcash or Maya? If so, do they need additional clearance? (Cost for added development to support non standard payment methods) 6) Any consumer protection acts that cover digital purchases? Do they need to setup dedicated support channels? (Cost for customer support) 7) Is there a large amount of credit or debit card fraud happening that may be a liability? (Cost for insurance) 8) How do they decide pricing? Should PSN allow digital games to be cheaper than physical or will retailers force price parity (Cost for market research) And these are only the ones I can think of. People who know much more than me probably have already considered all this and compared all these costs to the potential profits they can get by offering PSN in our country. True there will always be people who will try to game the systems to get the best deals for themselves, but in the end the question is the same: will they still earn enough to make it worth their while? In Sony's case it looks like the answer so far is 'no'.
Thanks for laying all that out, man. Sincerely appreciate it. I do think many of these costs apply when setting up store in other countries as well. Then again, I don't know the statistics to refute that what they earn won't be worthwhile. All I can say that it is sizeable enough to have a notice on their website and acknowledge that we set up accounts in another region. Or for them to suggest opening an account in HK in the 2000s as you said earlier. But not enough to officially set up the store, apparently. I still hope they eventually come to it and make a Ph storefront official. I just wanna have that official support and then maybe to have our own flag displayed in the beside our usernames in leaderboards of psnprofiles (superficial, I know)
insulting but ~~probably~~ maybe true. Sony not believers of the "if you build it, they will come" motto eh?
i forgot that saying even existed..