Sony won't let PlayStation users change their PSN ID due to the risk of players abusing the system, SCEA president Shawn Layden has explained.
"We want to give you more control across your experience and your profile and your presence on the network," Layden told IGN.
"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."
Asked by IGN whether the risk of abuse is the specific reason behind the feature's delay, Layden "answered in the affirmative".
"[We want to do name changing] in a way that's transparent, but also don't let people morph themselves, either," he continued. "And yeah, it's terrible that you have to make decisions on a service sometimes by optimizing around the bad actor. I hate 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?"