Sony has agreed to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to compensate PlayStation Vita owners for intentional false claims made in the advertising campaigns around the handheld's launch in late 2011 and early 2012.
In accordance with the settlement terms, SCEA will compensate everybody who purchased a PS Vita before June 1st, 2012. Eligible customers may choose between a $25 cash refund or a $50 voucher for select SCEA games and services. Sony is also barred explicitly from making similar misleading claims about future products.
"As we enter the year's biggest shopping period, companies need to be reminded that if they make product promises to consumers -- as Sony did with the 'game changing' features of its PS Vita -- they must deliver on those pledges," said FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Jessica Rich in a press release.
Around the time of launch, Sony' ads promised that PS Vita would introduce "game changing" features such as Remote Play. The ads claimed that players can pause games on PlayStation 3 games then resume them on PS Vita. Additionally, some ads explicitly showed Killzone 3 being played through Remote Play.
"In reality, most PS3 games were not remote playable on the PS Vita," noted the FTC. Sony also misled consumers by falsely claiming that PS Vita users could remotely play the popular PS3 game, Killzone 3, on the PS Vita. In fact, Sony never enabled remote play on its Killzone 3 game title, and very few, if any, PS3 games of similar size and complexity were remote playable on the PS Vita."
More importantly, Sony neglected to mention that users would have to buy copies of each game on both systems in order to be able to use Remote Play.
