I would say “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” but I’ve said that so many times about the PS3 already that I’m fully prepared to believe every word of this. Never mind that an entitlement is something you automatically have, whereas an achievement is something you have to work for. (It does say volumes about Sony’s mindset though – they clearly feel themselves entitled to next-gen victory!)
Still, what the fuck else would they call it? Rewards? Trophies? JoyBits? CongratulationPoints? MS definitely got the best name first…
If they’re going to call them that, then I hope to hell they actually make them worth something. Like with 1000 entitlements I get a song from their music store or something. Otherwise, I’m not entitled to anything.
I agree completely. Playing through games and unlocking points that have some sort of value beyond bragging rights would one-up Microsoft’s current gamer point scenario. However, MS could then assign some sort of value to counteract such a move.
Maybe after contributing 15% of your points until you turn 65, you can get a certain guaranteed number of them monthly, ensuring you can still gain them when you are too old to play video games.
Calling them “entitlements” is ridiculous unless they can somehow be redeemed for something. If so, that could be an interesting system. If not, it makes no sense because since when did “entitlement” mean even remotely the same thing as “achievement”?
Totally, and if they’re really calling them Entitlements, that’s the kind of system I’d expect. You get something back for your effort. Free maps, mods, music, movies or whatever. I know everyone around here’s in a pretty big hurry to embarrass Sony, but if all we know is the name, that’s not enough to condemn what they’re doing.
Don’t necessarily fault Sony for this. (Although you can fault them for the name if it’s true; the “ad hoc” and “infrastructure” modes on the PSP is what happens if you let engineers do the marketing.) Sony polled lots of publishers about what they’d like to see for Sony’s online feature set. I was part of EA’s group the sent suggestions and I certainly asked for something like achievements for two reasons: one, the more deltas there are between platforms - no matter how small - is more dev and QA for the game teams, and two, I wanted to be able to snort in disbelief whenever I saw Tom Chick’s flaccid PS3 Gamerscore.
Hopefully that name is just for internal company use, and when it comes time to make this feature public they pull a page from the Nintendo playbook and call them Twees, Snugglelumps, Fundrops, or something equally compelling.
