The Fat Princess Fiasco
Or how to completely spoon up on a dead cert.
Fat Princess, for those who don’t already know, is a downloadable PlayStation 3 exclusive game (though a PSP version of the game is in development). It’s published by Sony and developed by Titan Studios. The game consists of part RTS and part capture the flag, where you control one of 32 players (16 on each team) and the ultimate goal is to capture your own princess from your enemies’ castle, as each side has kidnapped the others’ princess. The name of the game derives from the fact that what you need to do is feed the old girl as much cake as you can, thereby fattening her up and making it as difficult as possible to free her back to your opponents’ base.
The game has a beautiful cartoon visual style and got many people excited about it when it was first shown off last year. Look!
Excitement for the game couldn’t be higher and then finally in April of this year a two week beta was opened to the public. Unfortunately, some issues came out of this beta, such as disconnections, games ending in stalemate and lag problems.
The game finally got a release date and a price for the end of July this year. You’d think that enough time had passed that those problems that the beta threw up would’ve been fixed, but oh no. However, a patch was quickly pushed through and mostly it seems to be working well.
That’s the smallest of errors though, because if you live in Europe, you’ve been treated like Sony’s prison bitch, which is where this blog post comes in.
Firstly, the official Sony Europe blog revealed that the game would be priced at $15 for our American brethren, so obviously this is a premium downloadable game, much like, say, Battlefield 1943 which also sells for $14.99, and equates to £9.99 which give or take is about right. For some reason though, Sony in their infinite wisdom, decided to price Fat Princess in the UK at £11.99.
Ok, it’s only 2 quid more but it’s the principle of the thing. I can’t believe that the pound got that much weaker in the space of time between the release of Battlefield and Fat Princess. What’s going on? Is it greed or the usual tax difference reasons? Not that the latter should matter as Battlefield’s price surely is correct? On the 360, 1200 MS points (what B:1943 sells for) is about 10 quid.
People began to get pissed off and complained in the comments of the Sony Europe blog piece and then someone at Sony did the only thing they thought they could do – they edited the original text and deleted the American price and replaced it only with the Euros and Pounds. Wait, what? That’s right, they clammed up and did a bit of the old revisionist history and hoped no-one would notice.
At the time of writing this, no-one at Sony has explained why the price shot up for Europeans and no-one has explained the editing of the original text. And this is why Fat Princess went from a day one purchase to a game I will never buy.
Just when you think Sony couldn’t screw things up any further, they really, really do.
