New PlayStation Store coming October 17, 23 to Europe, N. America

Sony is sprucing up its PlayStation Store, with a new look and improved functionality in customer-facing areas. The company showed off the upcoming changes, slated to hit October 17 in PAL-format areas and October 23 in North America, at a press event in London today attended by VG24/7.

The storefront itself is the most obvious change, which has been redesigned to take better advantage of both widescreen and standard definition formats. The main listings will intersperse various characters from relevant games throughout the horizontal-scrolling carousel, with easier to find categories specifically for games, movies and TV shows.

The most welcome news for users less than impressed by the old store, however, might be improved search functionality and categories that more clearly present PlayStation 3-centric content when viewed from a PS3. The search now intelligently presents options based on current input, and can account for common abbreviations like MW3 and typos. Listings can now also be filtered by price, as well as content type and peripheral support.

The store will also have more "agile" support for updates, allowing new content to be slotted in regularly instead of in infrequent chunks.