There aren’t many people who know about PlayStation Stars, a points system that can be your best friend if you know how to use it to your advantage. In fact, I suppose most people have no idea what it is, but the PlayStation rewards program is worth it, trust me. Let me show you.
Launched in the summer of 2022, PlayStation Stars is a program aimed at rewarding players for participating in the PlayStation ecosystem. You can take part in challenges to win digital collectibles and, most importantly, coins that can be redeemed for games, store credit, and some premium in-game currency.
It is a fairly standard rewards system. However, two years after its launch, Stars still seems like a latecomer that has not yet fully integrated into the PlayStation ecosystem. If you are a regular PlayStation player and are not in the Stars program, you could be missing out on a lot of gifts. But it’s not your fault, and the program should have changed a long time ago.
A very high barrier worth jumping
The main drawback of PlayStation Stars is the access. The only way to take advantage of any of the program’s features is through the PlayStation app. Two years ago, this seemed like a kind of slow rollout for the program: letting people dedicated enough to follow PlayStation try it out, and then making it more widely available and important for consoles. Two years later, nothing has changed.
The process of accumulating any type of reward remains to search for a campaign you want to do in the application, accept it in the application, go to your console to complete the task, and then return to the application to view or redeem any reward. It is a cumbersome process that goes against the goal of a rewards program: to reward players for staying in your ecosystem. But here it is the opposite, it makes you leave and then come back.
Most campaigns that reward players with coins, which can be redeemed for credit in the store, ask the audience to purchase a new release, play a game from the current PlayStation Plus library, or try a new game added to the Extra level.
It’s a little hassle to remember to go to the app to start each campaign, which is a shame considering it’s a useful reward. Individual coin payments are small, but players can gradually accumulate enough for a gift card or a free game every year or so without any issues. At least, it’s an added incentive to try out at least one new game each month that is already offered as part of my subscription.
There is also the curiosity of knowing what the digital collectibles of Stars are for. Some initially predicted that they would have some cosmetic function, allowing players to show them to their friends on their console.
But that has not yet materialized; they are simply on an application page. The fact that they are also offered in different rarities makes it even more curious if there was no larger plan for them (it should be noted that the program was launched during the peak of the NFT craze).
And it’s frustrating, because I still think that the PlayStation Stars program is a hidden gem that more people should take advantage of. Sony seems content with not promoting it, but that doesn’t benefit anyone. We all want to be rewarded for buying and playing on PlayStation, and PlayStation wants to make it as appealing as possible for us to stay on their platform.
I sincerely hope that PlayStation expands the Stars program with direct integration on the console. Especially now that PlayStation is taking the PC platform more seriously, it is strange that Stars is relegated to the app when synergy is the new standard.
