| PlayStation Store: Caveat Emptor |
[Jul. 18th, 2008|10:49 am] |
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This morning, I spent 68 frustrating minutes on the phone with the Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) staff, trying to figure out how they automatically charged $5 to my debit card to add funds to my PlayStation Store wallet — even though I had (so I thought) set my account up to not add funds automatically. What I discovered was very disturbing, and I’m documenting this here so other people don’t get caught in this trap.
Yesterday, I purchased a $4.99 add-on for Super Stardust HD for my PS3 from the PlayStation Store. I admit that I didn’t check my wallet too closely, but rather assumed that I had sufficient funds to purchase the add-on without having to add funds to my wallet first. (As an aside, I realized after the purchase that the add-on content was only a 100 KB download — kind of a rip-off for nearly $5, if you ask me.)
While checking e-mail this morning, I noticed two e-mails from the PlayStation Network. The first arrived at 7:53 PM, and was the expected confirmation message that I had made a purchase from the store; the second arrived at 7:56 PM yesterday, 3 minutes later, and served as confirmation that I had added $5 to my wallet from my debit card.
Say what? I immediately booted up my PS3 and confirmed in the “Manage your wallet and funding options” screen (under PlayStation Network → Account Management → Transaction Management → Manage Wallet → Change Options) that the “Automatically Add Funds When Needed” option was set to “No.” My understanding of the plain-English meaning of this setting should be obvious to any person fluent in American English. There were no qualifiers anywhere on this screen as to what this setting actually applies to, so the operating assumption that a rational person would make is that this setting applies to all PlayStation Store transactions.
So I called SCEA at (800) 345-7669 and waited a good 9 minutes to talk to a representative named Pat. She seemed initially sympathetic, but after being put on hold several times, she tried to give me an explanation that, frankly, didn’t make any sense. Maybe that’s because it wasn’t really an explanation, but sounded to me more like a mealy-mouthed excuse. After going around and around several times, she transferred me to a customer service manager named Billy.
Billy was initially confused as to what specific account setting on the PS3 I was talking about, so I had to lead him down the primrose path to which setting screen I was talking about. Once we got on the same page, so to speak, he did a bit of digging in some resource that he had available to him, and eventually told me that this particular setting only applies to subscription content.
Again, say what? I asked Billy if he could please point me to a resource that would tell me the same thing that he was telling me, because at this point all I had was his say-so that this setting only applies to subscription content. It took him 10–15 minutes to track down a page on the PlayStation website, but he was eventually able to point me to this page which contains the following broken English explanation (copied verbatim):
What is the automatic funding feature for the PLAYSTATION®Network wallet?
The Automatic Funding feature allows the PLAYSTATION Network system to deduct money from the credit card on file for a PLAYSTATION Network account (if there is a credit card is on file) when there are insufficient funds in the wallet to pay for content or services that is offered only on a subscription.
I’m still not absolutely convinced that this isn’t complete bullshit, because the knowledge center article on this particular topic isn’t particularly explicit as to which setting it refers to, or how the user navigates to this setting. I pointed out to Billy that the English phrasing was non-grammatical in several spots, not standard American Business English, and therefore unprofessional in appearance. I also pointed out that the “only on a subscription” qualifier was buried at the very end of the sentence.
It also occurs to me that, the way the sentence is written, it is not clear if the “only on a subscription” qualifier applies to just “services” or “content or services.”
I also pointed out to Billy that, regardless, the settings page on the PS3 itself contains no such qualifier, and therefore I questioned whether this was sufficient disclosure. In addition, I questioned whether, if it took Billy as long as it did to track down this “answer,” any normal person would have much hope of tracking down this information. Would anyone even be able to inform themselves adequately before they made a purchase? I doubt it.
Billy’s only excuse at this point was that the purchase confirmation screen (part of the shopping cart, or subsequent to the shopping cart) contains verbiage to the effect that funds will be transferred into one’s wallet if there aren’t sufficient funds already there. I countered that it was obviously too easy to miss this caveat, and would prefer if the store required active confirmation or positive acknowledgement before performing this transaction. I’m a software engineer, after all, and for legal compliance reasons I tend to design web applications in just this way, so that the user is at all times fully advised of what’s going on. Even a checkbox on the screen wouldn’t be sufficient if it’s checked by default — you need to get explicit opt-in authorization.
Furthermore, the purchase confirmation screen made it seem as though I already had sufficient funds in my account, partly because the same screen informed me that I’d have $4.20 left in my wallet after this purchase. This seems to be intentionally misleading, as I would have expected a negative balance indication if my wallet didn’t have sufficient funds. A normal person expects that their funding source (or the shopping cart software) will not let them complete a purchase if it doesn’t have sufficient funds.
Thankfully, this was only $5, but it’s easy to spend upwards of $30 in one session, and the wallet funding increments go up to $50.
I’m curious now... has anyone else got bitten by this problem? Are there any other settings in Sony software, on the PS3 or elsewhere, that don’t mean what they say? (Yeah, we all know about the rootkit fiasco with some copy-protected CDs, but I’m not talking about that.) |
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