Why PSN Won’t Be Renamed to SEN

As Dan pointed out earlier, there are rumours about the PSN being renamed to SEN. Well I’m here to tell you why I think this is extremely unlikely, with the aid of the following diagram.

SEN.

At IFA in September 2011 Sony announced that the new Sony Entertainment Network was the parent title for the collective services that is PlayStation Network, Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited. Use of all these services would be tied together with the PlayStation Account and PlayStation Wallet. So you could top up and use credit from a single service rather than three individual ones.

SEN’s Child Services.

The SEN’s child services, PlayStation Network; Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited, are going to be joined by PlayMemories in Spring 2012. If the PSN was to be re-branded as SEN, the sister services would, presumably, also lose their name to the SEN branding, making things even more confusing. Imagine taking out the middle nodes from the diagram. Instead of a set of 4 sister services and their child services, there’d be a parent service and 7 mixed up sister services, which makes the CES announcement of the “PlayMemories” service pointless.

Putting it another way: To keep the current structure as uninterrupted as possible, SEN would become a child service of itself.

PSN Account & PSN Wallet.

As the diagram shows, the PlayStation Account and the PlayStation Wallet is used across the SEN for funding of the different services, which as I said earlier, saves you from having an account for each of the services.

Expanding on the following excerpt from the quote in Dan’s post, the case is most likely to be a re-branding of the PSN Wallet and a merger of the PSN Account and SEN Account names. As you can see and guess, an SEN Account for SEN services makes more sense than having a PlayStation Account for the PSN and all of its (non-PlayStation branded) sister services.

“…your PlayStation®Network account will be renamed to a “Sony Entertainment Network” account or a “SEN account”“

What This Probably Means for Us.

Basically, not a lot:

• The PSN will likely remain as a child service of Sony Entertainment Network
• PSN Account & PlayStation Wallet will be renamed to SEN Account and SEN Wallet.

The PlayStation Network is a widely established brand and any change in name or SEN structure would most likely have been talked about during the CES conference. We wouldn’t have seen the PlayMemories series introduced into SEN if the plan was to abandon that tier of branding so soon after the announcement. Additionally, a change this severe would have a high, potentially unjustifiable cost, compared to the small cost of merging the SEN/PSN Account & Wallet.