Controversial collectible toy and statue manufacturer Gaming Heads claims that Sony has forced it to “destroy” its inventory of PlayStation products, including paid pre-orders of products waiting to be shipped to customers. In an email shared on social media, the Hong Kong-based firm said that its merchandise – including God of War, The Last of Us, Bloodborne, Sly Cooper, and Ratchet & Clank memorabilia – will no longer ship due to the Japanese giant’s decision.
“We have worked with Sony PlayStation for more than 10 years to bring you some of the best video game collectibles and have been trying hard to get them to change their mind,” the letter reads. “They know you have paid your hard-earned money for items that are ready to ship to you or that are in production, but unfortunately after doing all that we can they have told us not to ship your orders to you.”
The letter goes on to encourage fans to pile pressure on Sony’s commercial partnerships executive, and even includes an email address. Personally, we think the whole thing reads pretty unprofessionally, and we can’t see it improving Gaming Heads’ relationship with the platform holder – in fact, we imagine this will burn any remaining bridges between the two parties once and for all. It’s certainly not going to help paying customers get their statues.
It should be noted that the Reddit post about this particular situation is filled with poor stories about Gaming Heads’ customer service, and as we’re only hearing one side of the story here, we suspect there may be a lot more going on that the statue manufacturer doesn’t want us to know. We’ll try and contact Sony for clarification, but in the meantime, we just hope any paying customers are able to get their money back.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 25
I assume the licence they had with Sony ran out or they didnt pay the fee. So they sold those pre-orders before they were in the clear with Sony. Its a HK based firm after all lol
Pushing all the blame on Sony when clearly they would have known they had no permission to sell these. Only way I’d have any sympathy for them is if Sony suddenly and unexpectedly increased fees on a contract renewal, but it seems they would have had no problem saying that if it were the case.
How are you gonna say that they’re controversial and then not elaborate. Is this the only controversy they’ve had or has there been prior incidents?
Guy cooper, matches and stank, the few of them and Dak and jaxter statue pre orders will go live tomorrow probably… Definitely
Am I supposed to feel sorry for Gaming Heads? Tough ***** if your deal with Sony is at an end, they don't owe you a living, and they knew well ahead of time it was going to happen so if they took preorders then they are scammers.
I don't know if any of this is true but I'm on the internet so it seems appropriate 😊
@IndoorEnthusiast To be honest, Matches and Stank sounds like a better IP.
"You gave us your money, we won't ship our products, go claim your refund from SONY"...if that's not SCAM, I don't know what is
As far as I am aware, it's on the company not on Sony to refund the customers..so saying they are telling them to destroy inventory even if you have paid your hard earned money doesn't mean much here, because they didn't lose money. Whatever is going on between this company and Sony, obviously there is a reason for that.
@Deoxyr1bose "It should be noted that the Reddit post about this particular situation is filled with poor stories about Gaming Heads’ customer service, and as we’re only hearing one side of the story here, we suspect there may be a lot more going on that the statue manufacturer doesn’t want us to know."
They should be asking CDPR what happens when you try to force Sony to do refunds based on their own cock ups.
With how unprofessional the letter is, not elaborating why the takedown has happened and having people request their money from the IP Owners and not offer refunds themselves make it red flag city. Definitely some shady stuff on their end and because it’s against a big corp, it’s easy for them to push blame on them.
Removed - inappropriate language
So their deal is close to being up and then would be illegal for them to continue selling those merchandise, Sony aren't the ones in the wrong here.
The fact that they've tried to set the mob on Sony here won't be doing them any favours.
Even Disney tried that over Spider-Man that time and it didn't work.
We should buy games to support the industry, not statues.
@get2sammyb Would it be wise to block out the name and address of that Sony staffer?
I know people can just go to the twitter link anyway, but I've seen other sites running this story blocking it.
I get what you are saying, @get2sammyb, but calling the company 'controversial' because some people have made complaints about them, is a somewhat sweeping statement.
I would put money on the fact that probably many more people have complained about Sony on these forums alone than have complained about Gaming Heads in total. Does that mean Sony are a controversial company... 😉😂
also tells pre-order customers that Sony “has already received royalty payments from you on your orders that Sony PlayStation now wants us to destroy and not ship to you”.
Wow....this totally reaffirms my thoughts about Sony....they are sure the biggest anti consumer entity out there.
It's quite disgusting how they treat their partners and customers.
@MasterPlayerOne To be completely honest, this seems to be more Gaming Heads issue. Licenses expire all the time, if they didn't bother to renew it or simply weren't approved that's up to them to figure out. This post reads as a "we aren't going to refund you because we don't want to" statement really. If their license agreement expired and hasn't been renewed, they need to refund customers who ordered items that clearly aren't going to get delivered. Sounds like bad management lead to a temper tantrum like this one.
Sony is a piece of work, make no mistake, but this isn't their problem.
My take on this is that this company sold a bunch of status that they had not yet made, the bottom fell out from under the deal or they lost money or whatever, and now they are scapegoating the big bad corp for their screw-up. If this was legit, this company would just offer refunds and move on and not tell customers to go after Sony for refunds. I mean if you have all these statues ready for shipment that you have to destroy why in Saint's name did you not just ship them as they were getting finished? There are no statues, they just screwed up and are now skirting refunds.
Seeing a lot of comments here re: Gaming Heads losing their license to sell Sony products, knowing it was coming, etc.
I don't see that mentioned anywhere in this article, in their open letter, nor did I catch it in the Reddit thread if it's there. What did catch my attention is GH saying Sony has been paid royalties for the outstanding orders.
Are people jumping to conclusions about GH, or did I miss something somewhere?
@MasterPlayerOne Sure, if reaffirms your thoughts about Sony... if you accept this open letter at face value. However, there are several red flags here.
The first and biggest red flag is how unprofessional the letter is. Not just the tone of the letter, but publicly disclosing the name and email address of their corporate contact person. That is so extraordinarily unprofessional it is basically unthinkable.
Then there's the fact that they don't clarify just why Sony are doing what they accuse them of doing. Either Gaming Heads have a valid contract/licence to sell official merch, or they don't. If they believe they do and Sony doesn't, it becomes a legal dispute that they should settle with Sony. If no settlement can be reached, they should be seeking legal action, not setting a social media mob on Sony. And surely if they knew they had a valid contract, they would state so in this letter?
The third but certainly not least red flag, is that they are essentially saying "We have accepted your money but will not be sending you the product, nor do we have any intention of refunding you, go complain to Sony". That feels incredibly dodgy.
There's a lot wrong at Sony in my opinion, but in this case, I really don't feel like Gaming Heads come across as particularly credible. Something feels off.
This just sounds like they really, really don't want to, or intend to refund their customers and are thus blaming Sony in advance 😅
The letter sounds like it's been written by the Trump campaign in tone.
@MasterPlayerOne There's likely an expired/defunct contract and them continuing to produce products and sell them is thievery. People reprimand Nintendo day and night for protecting their IPs and it's insane. If it comes to light that this company is producing products for profit illegally then I sincerely hope everyone bands against the thieves.
As for the commenter I replied to.... jfc. Microsoft is the most anti-consumer company in gaming, FACT, and they've made gaming worse since 2002. Everything wrong with gaming today came from Microsoft's greedy hands. Sony protecting their IPs is never anti-consumer.
There’s got to be more to the story.
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