Today, PlayStation officially announced PlayStation Stars, a brand new loyalty program that will celebrate the player for being a part of the community. It will be free to join when it launches later this year. Players will earn rewards by completing a variety of campaigns and activities. Grace Chen, Vice President, Network Advertising, Loyalty & Licensed Merchandise spoke to The Washington Post said “We really feel like this is just the best time to be launching this type of program, in terms of us having the healthiest player base, the PlayStation 5, obviously, is a huge success and we really wanted to do something that can honor and celebrate PlayStation’s history, and now’s the best time to do so. We wanted to create a program that honors that journey and the role that PlayStation may have had in someone’s life. We wanted to do that in a way that only PlayStation can.”
For example, the “Monthly Check-In” campaign requires players to simply play any game to receive a reward. Other campaigns require players to win tournaments, earn specific trophies, or 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 to purchases on PlayStation Store.
“It’s beneficial for all players. Obviously, for players who have been with PlayStation for a long time and have been on this game journey with us, we want to be able to recognize and reward them in distinct ways, but there will be a lot of aspects about this program that new customers will enjoy as well,” Chen said.
There is also going to be a new type of reward called “digital collectibles.” These are as diverse as PlayStation’s 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.
This year, NFTs started to make its way into the industry with multiple companies announcing that they are getting into the market despite the negative reception from the video game community. “It’s definitely not NFTs. Definitely not. You can’t trade them or sell them. It is not leveraging any blockchain technologies and definitely not NFTs,” Chen said.