Last night, Sony released a new firmware update for the PlayStation 3. The now-live 3.41 update adds store recommendations to PSN store. From Sony:

 Firmware update 3.41 will add recommendations for games and videos on PlayStation Store. When you’re browsing through the details of a particular title, you’ll see a new “You May Like” section on the right-hand side. This section lists additional items based on the purchases of other PlayStation Network members who have purchased the item you’re currently looking at. 

I’ve heard on several sites, including Sony’s own Playstation blog where this was announced that this is such a useless update: why doesn’t Sony work on (insert your own craving) instead of these types of updates? While from the user’s end it might not be a very exciting update, these types of update are critical to the PlayStation Store for a few reasons. If anybody remembers when the store launched with the PS3, it was basically an HTML site. The speeds were slow, there was no video network on it, and the layout was hard to find content with. Fast forward to today, and we now have the capability to rent, buy, and transfer our movies to a PSP. The store has a ton of avatars, dynamic backgrounds, content is usually easy to find under the new structure, and as of recent, we can even rate content. For a lot of these updates, rating content and getting recommendations is important for a few key reasons. First, these options allow the user to more easily purchase content because they have more power in their hand. They won’t be afraid to purchase content because they will have an idea about if it’s good or not. Also, as the network expands and new users come on board, they don’t have to just scroll through categories to find content; they can see what others have purchased and discover new titles.

Playstation Store, early on.

So yes, this helps people navigate more easily and find content, but to those who are onboard with the brand already: why is this important to you? The more robust, functional and used the Playstation Store becomes, the more developers want to bring content over to it. Traditionally, unless you had a big budget for your game, you would not be featured on the store and now, we have access to all sorts of small and indie games. The Minis are a great example. This gives the players access to content that we didn’t have before unless we were on a iPhone or other type of device, and gives those developers a new audience and powerful platform to create content for. The same is also true for the big developers like EA and Activision. The more compelling a platform is, as in the more users interact with, purchase and use their content, the more likely they are to listen to your needs and wants and just offer more content in the future. This also means that Sony can have a greater leveraging power so we do get Demos at the same time as Xbox Live or when DLC is released, the PlayStation does not get it on a 6-month delay.

Last but not least, we have to remember that Sony is not just fighting Microsoft and the Xbox Live platform. There is the App Store from Apple, the Android Market, the Windows Marketplace coming soon on the Windows 7 phones which will have Live incorporated into them, and Steam on the PC. The more successful the PlayStation Store is, the more Sony can then invest in other area’s of its platform, like the (insert feature) that you want.

Last note: although the firmware is live, you won’t see the recommendations kick in until the end of this month, so in the next 4-5 days.

[Via Playstation Blog]