So today Sony has announced that users can finaly change their PSN online IDs (might not be available in your region just yet, but they are in the process of rolling it out). But just like in the beta announcements, significant caveats remain.

Only PS4 games published after April 1, 2018 even officially support the name change. Anything before that can have either smaller issues or even critical ones. PS3 and Vita games plain don’t support it at all (no surprise at this point, really). When all this was announced last year or so, along with the potential problems, it made it rather clear to me that whoever designed the system messed up in a MAJOR way. Having some understanding of database design due to my profession (software engineer), I can make an educated guess that they somehow must have very likely made the username the central ID of each user entry. But whatever the case may be, it was nothing good.

To put insult to injury, if you want to change your username more than once, you have to pay for each change after the first one. $9.99 regularly, or $4.99 if you are a PS Plus subscriber. Because if there’s something one likes to pay money for, it’s for risking to have problems with your library of games that they accumulated over the years, right?

I mean, isn’t the target audience for this feature mainly the people that have had an account for a long time now and they might not be happy with their old choice anymore? I kind of see the likelihood of those people having games either on PS3 or the PS Vita, as well as PS4 games from before April 2018 as pretty high, especially if they have had a PS Plus subscription for any significant amount of time. Unless those users don’t play the old games or the ones on the other platforms at all anymore, this feature is completely useless to a lot of them. But ah well, enjoy it if you can actually make use of it, this is mainly me venting about how Sony messed this up.

So, what are critical issues that people can have? Glad you asked. Those can amount to:

• loss of in-game currency (paid or earned)
• loss of game progress, including scores and trophy unlock progress
• loss of user-generated content or parts of the game may not function properly (on- and offline)

Fun, right? Hope none of your games are in the list of (currently) 10 that are confirmed to have these issues.

The list of games with known critical issues can be found here: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/network/onlineid/games-list-home/critical-issues/

There’s also a list of games with issues that amount to thankfully “only” annoyances: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/network/onlineid/games-list-home/issues-identified/

Games that have no known issues can be found here:
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/network/onlineid/games-list-home/no-known-tested-issues/