Sony Drops Entitlements, mostly

By George Walker | October 21, 2006

1Up is reporting that Sony has dropped a universal “entitlement” system similar in function to the XBox 360’s Achievement and GamerScore system. Their reasoning is pretty weaksauce.

“It’s very difficult to draw analogies [between] your success on SOCOM and your success on Madden. Madden players care about peoples’ success on Madden,” said Jack Tretton, Sony Computer Entertainment America exec VP. “So the publisher will have the flexibility to have a robust ranking system, on a game-by-game basis.”

I love this. Sony is once again taking the “we won’t implement it, but publishers can still do it, so we still kind of kept our promise that games would have it.” Whatever, Sony. We’ve all gotten pretty used to taking everything you say with a grain of salt, especially when you claim to want first-party titles to implement per-game achievements, but none of the first-party launch titles actually do.

This makes the PS3 online component of its games sound that much more like the haphazard approach that the PS2 had.