It's Official: No Guardians Cash

When the supplemental update was announced for the Japanese PC/PS2 servers way back in January of 2009, one of the most controversial aspects of the update quickly became Guardians Cash and the addition of a cash shop to PSU. For many months, debate raged among US/EU players as to whether or not Guardians Cash would be implemented when the supplemental update made its way to the West.

Today, Sega of America confirmed that Guardians Cash is dead on arrival to the US/EU game. It will not be part of the supplemental update coming later this summer.

On the official forums, PSU GM Edward announced the decision not to implement Guardians Cash, stating that the combination of Xbox Live complications and player feedback drove the change:

From a community standpoint, charging microtransactions for features that affect the game, on top of a monthly subscription, seemed unfair & unwise for our region. I think the community here expressed that, and this was the overall feeling of our team as well.

Also, there were actually a lot of technical challenges involved in the way Microsoft Points and/or Xbox Live functionality worked for small user transactions, particularly for the sorts of things GUARDIANS Cash worked for. This, combined with the overall negative sentiment towards having microtransactions for our version of the game plus the monthly subscription cost, made it a losing proposition to try to bring here. I'm happy with this decision, and I hope the community will be as well -- I think it benefits us in the long run.

Despite this, Edward also announced that Sega of America will be working with Sonic Team to try to bring all of the Guardians Cash content to the US/EU version of PSU:

We have spoken already at length with Sonic Team about this, and the decision has been made to bring content attached to GUARDIANS Cash to our servers. For example, specific GUARDIANS Cash items may be added in as future mission rewards or Casino items. This is just an example of what has been discussed; we have not decided all issues yet.

In other supplemental update news, Edward announced that Community Course, the feature that allows Japanese PSU players to play a restricted version of the game for free, will not be coming to the US/EU game. If the PC/PS2 servers were still active, I would have considered this to be surprising. I imagine that Xbox Live was the main factor in deciding to keep Community Course out of the game.

This must be good news for the Xbox 360 players who were afraid that Guardians Cash content would be left out of the supplemental update. For once, we're actually getting better treatment than the Japanese players, though it will probably be short-lived. Meanwhile, for many PC/PS2 players, I have a feeling the wounds of the April server shutdown are reopening...