Rumors have swirled about it for months and the subject was even faintly teased at by Sony late last month. But at long last the news is official as Sony is giving the PlayStation Store a facelift that no longer sees it retaining the core design it once had. Gone are the days of browsing through a web based store or one that was a bit of a chore to navigate as Sony is providing gamers with a sleek interface that looks to be one of the better design offerings the company has made in recent memory.
Unveiled today at a special press conference, the PlayStation Store is receiving a facelift that has shades of what we’ve seen from Sony’s other services such as Video Unlimited. Abandoning the blue interface of the PlayStation Store and it’s very modular look in favor of one that’s more elegant, the PlayStation Store may now have a design that look like it took a page out of Microsoft’s book, but hopefully it won’t take us five minutes to find the latest indie based offerings.
Following PSN tradition, the new PlayStation Store will launch soon, as is next week soon. Eager PS3 gamers in Europe can experience the new PS Store on October 17th while it’ll be launched the following week, October 23rd, in North America. Besides a new design interface which aim to make accessing content easier, a whole new host of features haven’t been added to the store that will change how gamers access content. So if you were waiting for feature X for three years then you may be out of luck.
The new look of the PS Store is definitely different from what we’ve seen in the past, especially in respect to the more modern design which is built around dynamic pages that are tailored around specific games. All the previous store upgrades have taken awhile to get used to so I expect as much with this latest redesign, though I hope in the end that its arrival doesn’t result in new problems and issues arising amongst gamers.
