Capcom says that the extended downtime of the PlayStation Network is costing the makers of Street Fighter and Mega Man hundreds of thousands of dollars. Answering a question on the company's official Unity Blog, Capcom senior vice president Christian Svensson said that the downtime is costing "hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue".
"I'm frustrated and upset by it for a number of reasons," he wrote on the blog. "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," he added. "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'."
A Sony Japan representative said over the weekend that PSN would be "fully operational" May 31.
Source: Capcom Unity Blog
Comments
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
This does kind of lead into something else I've been wondering: How will this impact upcoing titles for the PS3 salted to be coming out in the next few months or so? Like, for example, Sucker Punch Studios' Infamous 2? It has to be hurting them somehow if they can't access the network to make last minute fixes and tweaks.
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
This is a good example of why, if it really was just the payment hack, Sony would be trying so hard to stick to the 'hackers got everyone's personal data' story. Companies might be annoyed but understanding at profit loss due to such an intrusion.. but if it DOES turn out to simply have been that dev hack (pure speculation of course), Sony's partners would be absolutely livid that they are loosing so much revenue simply because Sony wanted to stop a few people from downloading free stuff....
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
Hm, maybe, but I don't know that it's safe to assume third-party publishers disagree with Sony's "anti-piracy" measures -- keep in mind that Capcom STILL hasn't published Super Street Fighter 4 on the PC due to the rampant piracy of the previous version of the game, despite acknowledging that they sold lots and lots of legit copies.
And while he's going with the angle that this is retribution over OtherOS (a line which I still don't entirely buy; it's entirely possible but far from proven), he certainly doesn't show any sympathy for the attackers.
Not that any reasonable person would, of course; screw those guys. That's a point I've seen get lost far too often in these ridiculous us-versus-them arguments: criticizing Sony does not equate to praising the people who did this.
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
I'm pretty much certain the feeling towards the attackers, ESPECIALLY if their goal was to steal any information at all, is anger or disgust from all around the board. Even toward SONY, from anyone that doesn't support the "they were the target hence blameless" argument, if their security was not strong enough, I think there's a consensus that they drop the ball so hard on this one.
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
Whether this is retaliation for the OtherOS and related lawsuites, it seems likely that these types of attacks will happen on public companies in the future. We shouldn't squander this opportunity to make sure that any business, large or small, like or unlike Sony, do their due diligence in protecting the private information it collects. They may be the victim, but if they have not taken reasonable efforts to protect this information they are also to blame.
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
And the customers are already losing patience.
Re: Capcom: PSN Downtime Costing Us 'Hundreds of Thousands ...
That implies that they haven't lost it already.