"It's now Monday, the week after Sony told us to expect some functionality to return to the PlayStation Network. Sadly, that has not happened: you can't play your games online, make digital purchases, or download demos; the service remains completely dead. Sony is claiming that it's still unpacking the extent of the attacks, and the industry has begun to try to put a dollar amount on the damages being suffered by the Japanese company."
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Member since:
2007-03-07
You can't put a dollar amount on the damage that has been suffered to Sony's reputation. that damage is unrepairable and is going to hurt sales of the PlayStation line for years to come.
You can put a dollar amount on the 125 million refunds they are going to have to issue for the month that PlayStation network subscribers had no service. And the 125 million insurance policies and credit monitoring policies they are going to have to buy their customers in case their identity gets stolen.
Edited 2011-05-09 21:37 UTC
Member since:2006-05-12
Member since:2006-03-12
It was something like 77 million users, most non-paying. Except, of course, for store items, which have been shut off cold - both the publishers' income and Sony's commission.
Sony has been a terrible communicator throughout this debacle. It took entirely too long for them to announce the details they have, and through that process, they have not been clear on whether passwords were obtained (they said user passwords were not encrypted - but later they said they were hashed... which means they were not passwords, so which is it?), and all of their target dates have been meaningless, so why should the 31st be any less wishful thinking? "Final stages" is not helpful information - it's a bar stuck at 99%, offering no e.t.a. or sense of what's taking place. We don't know how much they had to rewrite, whether rewritten parts are functional, or if they even know what exploit was used so they can patch it. For all we know, everyone at Sony goes to work, stares at the clock for eight hours, and leaves, because the end user's view hasn't changed one pixel.
A thing that concerns me that I haven't seen anyone else bring up is that Sony hasn't communicated any better with their retailers or advertisers than they have with their customers. This downtime is an emergency with their product. In a fire, you tell people to get out of the building; in a severe storm, you tell people to get to the basement; in a long, protracted network outage, you tell advertisers to stop running the commercials about the great new multiplayer game, and you tell retailers to take PSN cash cards and PSP Go vouch codes off the shelves. I wonder if many PS3s have been returned since the outage began because a buyer plugged everything in right, and it just didn't do what it was supposed to.
Member since:
2005-11-10
Member since:
2005-07-24
