It’s no surprise to anyone that actually owns a PS3 that the Playstation Store needed “something” done to it. It wasn’t efficient, and didn’t seem very “fancy” compared to other aspects of the system and experience (hold your PSN jokes, Xbots!) We now have the new Playstation Store on our PS3s and despite some initial issues that are sure to be worked out, I have to hand it to whoever is responsible… Thank You! You’ve made just about everything I can think of about the store better. Don’t stop working because it’s still not perfect, but you do deserve praise for what you’ve done so far.
Overall, I think pretty much everyone agrees things are now better. There are widespread reports of slow loading of in-store images (possibly related to hundreds of thousands of people trying to update their image cache at the same time), some reports that the image caching isn’t… well… caching images, and a few folks have reported a slight graphical glitch when scrolling text descriptions.
The slow loading images seems to be compounded by no “loading” indicator, so you don’t know if everything’s loaded or if it’s taking 5 minutes for the next image to load. If you ask me, it’d be nice if Sony auto-queued an image bundle to each user’s download queue so they would have the entire existing image cache for the store.
Once the images for an area are loaded, navigation is nearly at “button press” speed… if you want to drill in three layers, you can go as fast as you can click (and it looks nice!). I absolutely love the fact that the circle button is now “back” instead of “exit store;” that alone is worthy of sitting through a firmware update in my opinion.
If you own a PS3, have you had the chance to check out the new store yet? What do you think? What do you like the best from the new store and what still needs to be addressed? I haven’t actually purchased anything yet and as I said before, I expect things to settle down shortly and I think the store possibly might be updated again to take care of those annoyances listed above, so I’m going to withhold final judgment, but as it stands now, even with these minor issues, I’d call the PS Store update a resounding success!
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7 responses so far ↓
1 GideonB // Apr 15, 2008 at 3:09 pm
After watching a few videos of it on Youtube of the New PS Store I think it looks a lot sleeker than the original launch version and should be a lot more user friendly to people (including you Lono) and It would be a great way to give people a taster of what the Playstation Marketplace (new one) compares to the Blades system of the Xbox 360
2 Anski // Apr 15, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I downloaded the update and poked around a little this morning before I went to work. While I also had the image loading problems (which I attributed to many people trying it out but it of course could be something else), I love the new store itself. Even without the images the text was still there for the blank boxes when you highlighted them, so I poked through about every part of the store. I’m really impressed with it and can’t wait for the image loading stuff to be resolved.
When is Still Alive coming out on the PSN again?
3 Sean "Rothbart" Workman // Apr 15, 2008 at 4:25 pm
@Anski: Still Alive should be there Thursday for the regular update. The way I understood it is that anything that would’ve normally come out over the last two Thursdays is coming out on the 17th.
4 DVNO // Apr 15, 2008 at 9:20 pm
I like it a lot better than the old store, it looks so much better and it operates much smoother. The only small complaint i would have is that you have to go through a lot of pages, but they load up really fast, so its not reall a problem.
5 FinalWhiteDove // Apr 16, 2008 at 4:27 am
Actually being able to access it would be nice.
Every time I try I get an icon that looks like the system update icon in the top button in the navigation menu and then a box appears saying ‘An error has occurred: 80023101′. Then I press the X and it exits.
It is so annoying and I have NO idea what it is, I have googled it and there is even an error codes list on the US Playstation boards but it doesn’t contain this one which even further ups my annoyance due to the fact that the rest of you ARE able to access it!
6 Lono // Apr 16, 2008 at 10:27 am
Checked it out last night. It’s ten thousand times better than the old version… It’s science!
7 smon jiff // Apr 22, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Most people may find this hard to believe but the reason i have not had a chance to check out the new store is that my PS3 is currently away for repairs.
Must have been left in the same room as a 360 at some stage or something… :sadfacce:
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