Yesterday Sony outlined the list of freebies that PS3 and PSP owners can choose from as a thank you for persevering through the PSN outage. Not as an apology, but as a thank you. Many, myself included have been very critical of this offering. In my view it seems to be purely a way of placating the masses and soothing the conscience of some people at Sony.
www.yetanotherreviewsite.co.uk/details-of-the-psn-welcome-news~3754.htm
My criticism is not about the games, though they are reasonably older than I would have liked, they are actually good games. Some have commented that the only people who are moaning are games journalists who already own the games. I am not sure that is true – I have only ever owned inFamous and I am moaning – ok, so wouldn’t say I am a journalist. However, I am privileged enough to run this site and I do get free games from that.
I am moaning because I feel this is a very cynical bit of PR. Give people free stuff and they will forget about what happened.
I am not blaming Sony for the data breach. They are not faultless. They dropped the ball and possibly pissed of the wrong people. I do blame the hackers. What they did was unacceptable. They are not heroes sticking it to the man. They are criminals pure and simple. Whether they use the data they have stolen or not, they still stole your information. As such, you should absolutely be angry with them for all of ball ache they have caused you.
PSN going down for three of four weeks is not the end of the world. People have not died because they could not play Portal 2 online. On the flip side, some say that the basic PSN which most of us have, is free – I disagree slightly. It comes at the cost of the console. You buy it as part and parcel of the console package. You would be pissed if your controller broke under warrantee but no one would fix it for you. Worse still, no one would talk to you. But, by the same logic the controller was free when you bought the PS3 so why worry?
Anyway, I digress. The reason I am annoyed with Sony and why I hope many others are annoyed, is with how the whole affair was handled. They knew there was a breach seven days before they mentioned it to anyone. Seven days is a pretty long time. The trouble is, not much improved from there. The first week after the announcement there was very little in the way of communication. Slowly the Playstation blog began to post the occasional update and a few apologies and assurances. To me it all seemed rather late and little half hearted. They should have been shouting from the top of tallest building on earth every day about what they were doing and how long things would take. Even if no one was listening anymore!
I don’t believe for a minute that many people started jumping ship to Xbox. I am amazed Microsoft didn’t monopolise on the situation with offers actually! To be honest, in two or three months I doubt anyone will even remember what happened, but for a few faint echoes of opinion posts like this. Then, Sony will have got away with one of the worst handled PR disasters in ages. Sure, it will have cost them getting things working again, but they would have had to do that eventually anyway. They will have lost revenue and will maybe a few smaller dev houses being a little more cautious.
But at the end of it all, we will have a couple of old games for free and even though our personal details will still be floating out there with God knows who, that will satisfy the majority of users out there.
Well played Sony.