Post-Outage: Where does Sony go from Here?

The ordeal is finally over. As of Sunday morning, Sony has enabled the full experience of online multiplayer on the PSN, with the store and other associated services set to be released soon. In addition they’ve come up with a compelling, “Welcome Back” program that has a nice set of games.

However, there are as many differing opinions on the return of the PSN as the number of days it was out, (24 to be precise). However, it’s not exactly like everyone’s going to jump ship.

Modern consoles are an investment, and there’s a whole lot more money involved besides an online service. Both the 360 and the PS3 hit 300-400 bucks on their own. Plus, add to that the game(s) in question that people missed out online. Finally when all that’s settled people would have to invest $60 for a Gold Membership for Xbox Live.

If you’re this dedicated to online gaming, even for just one game, that’s gonna run you about $420 dollars for all of these. Chances are you’re probably gonna want DLC which can range from $5 to even $10 dollars. This isn’t enough money for people who have been with Sony for years to jump ship.

However customers yet to adopt a PS3 would probably be cautious. After all the PSN being down is a recreational problem, but credit card theft is still REAL theft. Yes, it was an outside cause for this security breach, but from what I’ve heard Sony wasn’t really hard to crack, and had serious security flaws that are normally basic procedures (One being, keeping credit card info-holding servers off the net!)

In all honesty, the biggest problem Sony will face from this will be people who have both consoles in some cases switching their “default” console to 360, as well as an over-reliance on PSN cards. The latter means Sony will lose money to brick-and-mortar stores, but honestly probably not by much. If anything, they may gain money from people over spending since they only come in packs of 5, 10, 20, and 50.

And the “please-don’t-ditch-us-guys!” giveaway has some pretty nifty stuff. People with PSN accounts that existed before the outage will be able to download two of the following (In North America at least): Little Big Planet, inFamous (Yes in their entirety), Super Stardust HD, Wipeout HD, and Dead Nation (think Left4Dead lite). These are kept forever, and are in addition to free/extended PlayStation Plus, depending on whether or not you had one previously.

I think Sony reacted appropriately to the situation, but I feel that had they taken better precautions they would have never entered this mess. People can argue about how they did PR-wise and I feel they made decent decisions. Honestly, in the years to come this will all just be a story about how I got a free download of inFamous.