As reported by IGN.com, the PlayStation Network launched in 2006 alongside PlayStation 3, and there's no way to change your name short of creating a new account, therefore losing all of your purchases, Trophies, friends, and more.
According to Shawn Layden, Sony Computer Entertainment America's President and CEO,
"The road map for feature extension is very long. It goes from here to Hangzhou in China," Layden remarked when IGN asked about not only changing one's PSN name, but about other oft-requested features like deleting unwanted Trophies. "And all of those things are on there. Yeah, we want to give you more control across your experience and your profile and your presence on the network."
"At the same time, as you'll understand, we don't want to make it so that you can go in, grief a bunch of people in Far Cry, change your avatar, change your username, go into CoD and grief everybody over there. We want to stop that."
When asked if that issue specifically -- the risk of abuse -- is what's holding up the feature being implemented, Layden answered in the affirmative. Transparency in changing your name seems to be the issue at hand.
"[We want to do name changing] in a way that's transparent, but also don't let people morph themselves, either. And yeah, it's terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I h@te that we have to do that. So we're trying to balance that between… the 99 percent of users going to have a good experience, how can we help make that happen without giving one more tool to the bad actor to go in and ruin the experience for others?"
In latest buzz, PlayStation Network isn’t up and running for a lot of gamers right now. Sony’s online gaming service is experiencing an intermittent outage.
PlayStation-console owners on social media are complaining about connectivity issues and errors that are preventing them from logging into PSN. This is also causing problems for people trying to boot into games and others who are trying to use video services like Netflix and PlayStation Vue. Read more at VentureBeat.