![]() SingStar customers, by this stage, just want Sony to come clean. Yet it’s about competitions, emojis and the odd quiz, rather than anything tangible about the game. The SingStar Twitter feed, for instance, is pleasant, bouncy and reasonably regularly updated. But still: games like Just Dance manage regular updates, whilst the Now That’s What I Call Music brand is launching its own karaoke title on games consoles this Christmas.īut the bigger part of the problem is that Sony is engaging with its SingStar customers, but not actually telling them anything they can count on. Licensing tracks for games is competitive now, and may just be more expensive. We are still working hard on getting new tracks but as we said above, this can take a long time”.Īnd this might be part of the issue. So what’s the problem? Well, according to Sony, “Sadly over the past year we haven’t had as many tracks available to us to license for the SingStore, which is why we’ve not been able to do updates every two weeks. Sony later revealed that “we were working on an update for release in April but unfortunately we just didn’t have enough songs and didn’t want to disappoint you and the rest of the community with another small update”. People did still stay tuned, but the update never came. As it posted on Twitter on April 27th 2015, “to everyone asking about SingStore updates, we are working on the next one… Stay tuned!” The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, back in April, Sony had promised further progress. Sample comments? “Shockingly poor form – wouldn’t be so bad if PS4 could play PS3 and PS2 discs or had all downloads available” … “still using this rhetoric as a stalling tactic?” … “that tells us diddly squat … how can and do other games do it successfully yet you can’t?” That was three months ago, and you don’t have to scroll far down the list of Facebook comments to find irate SingStar users. We appreciate you all being so patient as we really want to bring you the best SingStar experience possible! The licensing process can take some time to finalise, so we’re going to carry on working on this behind the scenes for a little while longer.Īdditionally, our development team have been working on an update for the game which will be released later in the year. “We wanted to let you know that we are still working very closely with our partners in the music industry to license new tracks, and we’re sorry there hasn’t been a SingStore update for a while. The last was posted in July 2015, and read: On the official SingStar Twitter and Facebook accounts, Sony remains insistent that further updates are coming. That’s led many to conclude that the game has been abandoned by Sony, yet that isn’t the case. At its peak, SingStore was being updated fortnightly with new tracks, and this went on for over half a decade. At the time of writing this piece – October 2015 – the last listed update to the SingStore dated back to March 2015. This is then compounded by the fact that the promised regular updates to the SingStore have simply not happened. Neither PS2 or PS3 discs, however, can be used with the PS4 version. Those who had bought, for instance, PlayStation 2 SingStar discs were freely able to use them on the PlayStation 3 version of the game. Presumably there are some rights issues in there, but it’s surprising, given that backwards compatibility has always been one of SingStar‘s strengths. ![]() There have been assurances that progress is being made, but for those who invested heavily in song libraries on earlier versions of SingStar, this still rankles. The problem? Only a fraction, a year down the line, have actually become available. You could, through simple app wizardry, use your mobile phone as your mic.Ĭustomers who had bought add-on tracks for the PlayStation 3 version of SingStar were told that they’d be able to download them for free on the PlayStation 4 version as and when they became available. This time, too, you didn’t even need to invest in microphones. A new disc was launched, bringing the game to the PlayStation 4 for the first time. The bigger relaunch, though, came last year. Sure, not everyone wanted to download the core game (grumbles were duly noted), but the change of pricing mechanic was an attempt to invigorate the series in the era of downloadable content and in-app purchase. It made the core game free and downloadable, and you just bought the songs you wanted. But as things slowed down, Sony changed things around. For some time, SingStar was a solid success.
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