With the outage of Playstation Network having entered its fourth week, Sony has confirmed that the network is likely to remain down for at least several more days. A short statement posted on the the North American and the European blogs provides few details, with no new updates regarding earlier news that the network had entered internal testing stages.
As the downtime of the network continues to mount up, Senior Vice-President of Capcom, Christian Svensson, has stated on the Capcom forums that while he is annoyed with the downtime on a personal level, he expresses concerns for the financial losses this may have for his organization. With losses running between hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of Dollars, Svensson indicates that the company is missing out on funds that were to be used to further the development of several titles.
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”.