PlayStation Loyalty Program Announced

[Moonface]

Today, I’m pleased to reveal PlayStation Stars, a brand new loyalty program that celebrates you, the player, for being on this ever growing gaming journey with us. PlayStation Stars will be free to join when it launches later this year. Once you become a member, you’ll earn rewards by completing a variety of campaigns and activities. Our “Monthly Check-In” campaign simply requires you to play any game to receive a reward, while other campaigns require you to win tournaments, earn specific trophies, or even be the first player to platinum a blockbuster title in your local time zone.

All PlayStation Stars members will have opportunities to earn loyalty points. Points can be redeemed in a catalog that may include PSN wallet funds and select PlayStation Store products. As an additional benefit, PlayStation Plus members enrolled in PlayStation Stars automatically earn points for purchases on PlayStation Store.

Also, as part of PlayStation Stars, we are unveiling a new type of reward called “digital collectibles.” Collectibles are as diverse as our portfolio of products and franchises. They are digital representations of things that PlayStation fans enjoy, including figurines of beloved and iconic characters from games and other forms of entertainment, as well as cherished devices that tap into Sony’s history of innovation. There will always be a new collectible to earn, an ultra rare collectible to strive for, or something surprising to collect just for fun.

Source: PlayStation Blog

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I'd like to add that the digital collectibles part is not NFT's, as clarified by Sony themselves. They're likely just the equivalent of the sorts of collectibles you can find in many video games.

As for my thoughts on this, I like the sound of it. It seems similar to the Nintendo or Steam points systems (I don't know if Xbox has something like it too), although I doubt points are going to be quick to earn for any notable redemptions on wallet funds, considering everyone can earn these and Sony isn't going to just hand everyone a ton of free money.

[WR91]

Although I'm happy to see a program like this come out from PlayStation, I wish it would have come out this past generation. I have over 300 games for the PS4 and around half of them are digital. I would have earned some serious rewards from the program.

[Moonface]

Although I'm happy to see a program like this come out from PlayStation, I wish it would have come out this past generation. I have over 300 games for the PS4 and around half of them are digital. I would have earned some serious rewards from the program.

Oof, that sounds really rough.
And I thought it was bad when I had to replay some of my completed PS3 games from scratch to earn their retroactively added trophies when Sony adopted the trophy system.

[Moonface]

First Look at PlayStation Stars' Digital Collectibles
Today's PlayStation State of Play gave us our first look at some of the digital collectibles that will be available as part of the PlayStation Stars loyalty program, which will be rolling out in Asia and select territories starting later this month.



Some more details were given over at the PlayStation Blog:

Once you’ve earned collectibles, you can arrange them in a virtual display case within the PlayStation App and, if you choose, you may display your collectibles case within your PSN profile to friends. There will be different ways to acquire or earn collectibles – the primary way will be through completing campaigns.

The campaigns in PlayStation Stars will be fun, delightful, and yes, sometimes challenging to complete.  A campaign may be a point-earning or collectible-earning activity.  One of our first campaigns is “Hit Play/1994,” where members who correctly launch games that match song-based clues receive a special collectible. More campaign details to come.

[Frank]

I like this idea! Having little digital keepsakes... This concept reminds me of the collectibles you could collect in Astrobot PS5.

[Moonface]

I won't be surprised to see some digital collectibles be a pre-order bonus for PlayStation Studio titles down the line.

[Frank]

I'd love for them to take this concept even further, and have some of the collectibles be little LCD style games featuring PlayStation mascots.

[Moonface]

I'd love for them to take this concept even further, and have some of the collectibles be little LCD style games featuring PlayStation mascots.

Seeing you mention mascots, I wonder if Sony will be able to get anything for third party games that are iconic to PlayStation, such as Crash and Spyro. I know they had references to at least Crash in Astro's Playground, so there could be a chance.

I also wonder if Sony will try to gauge user interest in any of their dormant IP with these collectibles by seeing if any particular ones get commonly displayed in players cases.