Last week, we told you that game developers were preparing for PlayStation Network name changes to arrive. Now, the news is official, with Sony announcing this morning that users will be able to change their old PSN IDs starting in early 2019.
The first change will be free, Sony says, and subsequent changes will cost $US10 a pop (or $US5 if you’re a PlayStation Plus member). Australian pricing hasn’t been announced yet.
Beta testing for the service will start soon, if you’re part of PlayStation’s preview program and want to try it out.
The catch? Not all PS4/PS3/Vita games are going to support your new ID. Explains Sony:
When you change your online ID, you will have the option to display your previous ID with your new ID, so your friends can recognise you. Once you decide to display your old ID or not, you won’t be able to adjust this after completing the online ID change process.
This feature is compatible with PS4 games originally published after April 1, 2018, and a large majority of the most-played PS4 games that were released before this date. However, please note not all games and applications for PS4, PS3 and PS Vita systems are guaranteed to support the online ID change, and users may occasionally encounter issues or errors in certain games.
If for any reason you experience issues after changing your ID, you can revert back to your original ID for free at any time (you will only be able to revert once during the preview program).
Reverting back to an old ID will resolve most issues caused by the ID change. In addition, when this feature officially launches, a list of compatible games published before April 1, 2018, will be provided on PlayStation.com for reference before you make a change.
This has been one of the most-requested PlayStation 4 features for nearly 13 years now, since the PlayStation Network first launched in 2006.
Comments
15 responses to “PSN Name Changes Are Officially Coming”
I don’t understand the big deal about this.
Gamers tend to latch onto any perceived problem regardless of whether it actually matters or not, resulting in whining en masse.
I certainly don’t believe that Sony deserve quite as much hate as they have garnered for lacking this feature.
That said, it is a standard feature across the board and has been on the vast majority of the internet for twenty years so It boggles the mind why they never allowed it sooner.
For one, I’m looking forward to changing away from the tag I used as far back as 2003 but I never got up in arms about being unable.
There’s quite a few examples of people using very old accounts suddenly being banned due to having an “offensive” I.D. All it takes is for some snowflake to raise a complaint. Think things like 420forLife etc (just an example). Being able to change it is far preferable. Also, people with older ID’s are often targets of hackers as they have the more desirable ID’s without numbers XxXXx’s etc. Again, if people are making hacking attempts it’s far less hassle to just forgo that ID for something less desirable.
So long McLovin93, SPARTAAA, LightYagami, LroyJenkins, LelouchZero, Dexter4VR, SanjogLYER, HMontana, HazChzbrgr, SuzumiyaH we hardly knew you.
Actually, we knew them for way too long 😛
As someone who used their real name as my PSN username way back when I first set it up, it cannot come quick enough. It was a remarkable lack of imagination on my part which I have been paying for ever since.
Your real name is Hondo Bogart?
I would like to the first to commend Hondo’s parents. Brilliant.
I wish… That is an anagram of my real name. What I should have used for my PSN all those long dark years ago.
Hodor T. Bogan?
I hate thinking up usernames, so I probably won’t change mine even though it’s crap and unimaginative. (I came up with my Kotaku username after someone referred to us as the ‘hoi polloi’)
I’m not sure why Sony couldn’t just assign aliases to the account. In other words, your original username will always be your account name, but when you game it’s your alias that displays.
Is ‘BigButtFlatulence’ taken?
Yeah, they really need to do something like what Discord or Blizzard does – let you take any name you like, and put some numbers on the end. It sucks that the name I use basically everywhere (except here) is taken by someone from years ago when PSN IDs first appeared and hasn’t got a single trophy to their name. It’s just parked uselessly forever.
There are a few other articles around explaining why its not that easy. It basically comes down to how they set it all up in the first place, and tieing it to your PSN ID name and not something that’s so limited.
There are plenty of ways it could have been better, but to be fair they couldn’t have foreseen these issues 12 years ago. Nobody could have predicted quite how important your online persona would be today.
I didn’t get the name I wanted either (there or here) but got close enough that it wasn’t a biggie (there and here), but I wasn’t 12 when I signed up so it isn’t embarassing. That’s the group I cheer for with this – Spongebobbb4Lyf would have been fine when 12, not so much at 24…
Time to grow up to MoabMan.
I been stuck with a username I came up with when I was in high school 12 years ago and it was a terrible user name dark_lord_2007 can’t remember what it meant but at least it will be gone soon