So another day is passing and you still aren’t playing any online games on the PSN thanks to Sony’s incompetence in securing the network. And really it’s now verging on impossible to defend after all the information that we have heard about these leaks.
But it’s not only Sony and us, the general public, who are suffering at the hands of these hackers, we should maybe spare a thought for the gaming companies who are losing millions thanks to the unavailability of the PSN.
Think of it this way, you create a game and release it to all BT Game stores all over the country, you budget for a certain amount of sales and expect a certain amount of money coming in… then you find out that BT lost the keys to their stores and won’t be opening again for 4 weeks.
After which time your super duper title is old news and you’ve effectively lost a whole bucket load of money.
This is what Capcom’s Corporate Officer/Senior Vice-President (Christian Svensson) is saying when he headed to the Capcom forums and posted the following
I’m frustrated and upset by it for a number of reasons.
As a consumer, I also play games online on PS3, which I can’t do… and likely my personal information is also compromised. Secondly I like to buy things in the PlayStation store and that I can’t do right now.
On a related note, as an executive responsible for running a business, the resulting outage obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget. These are funds we rely on to bring new games to market for our fans.
In short, the hackers appear to be trying to “punish” Sony for some perceived injustice, and they’ve been effective in that I suppose. But they’re also punishing millions of other consumers and businesses which makes it impossible to be sympathetic to their “cause”.
Let’s also not forget that Capcom also have Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 which requires a permanent PSN connection to play for DRM purposes so they are having to field that barrage of calls and other developers have the same issue with titles like Final Fight: Double Impact and others.
In short the PSN downtime is a disaster on so many levels that it boggles the mind that it was allowed to happen and that Sony didn’t appear to have a solid backup plan.
Could you imagine any other online service realistically being down this long?
Source: Capcom Forums
Last Updated: May 10, 2011
