The Playstation Network, which hosts 70 million users (and many of their credit card information), conducts virtual transactions, and is the backbone of online interactions and multiplayer for the Playstation 3, has been down for more than 4 days now. It’s being/has been attacked by the hacker group Anonymous, who are taking revenge on behalf of a guy Sony sued for distributing a hack of the Playstation 3. Not only is this drawing a hail storm of bad press for Sony, for suing its users, having no network available, and for being susceptible to hacker attacks, but it is also incredibly bad timing. Two big games just came out last week, both with multiplayer components (Mortal Kombat and Portal 2), and undoubtedly this is hurting sales of those games and of any content available on the Playstation Network.
It’s really too bad that Sony is making such a mess of this: Remember, this all started because Sony pulled support for installing other operating systems, sparking consumers to try and create their own workaround. Who knows why Sony felt they needed to pull this feature, that many consumers believed they would have when they purchased the system. Even if only 5% of users utilized the feature, why upset those (probably very dedicated) users needlessly? Then Sony made a second bad decision – suing the guy who released the workaround, and going too far by obtaining the IP addresses of everybody who visited his site through discovery. Then they ended up fighting a legal battle against a hacker, who was supporting his side through donations from all the random people who, presumably, now hate Sony. Sony is losing a lot of money doing this: They are losing at least $2 million in sales per day PSN is down, and I’m sure even more on fixing the network and legal costs. A disaster.
It’s really too bad, because Portal 2 is the game of the year thus far. It’s simply a masterpiece, and nobody saw it coming after Portal one, which, in retrospect, was a demo/proof of concept that evolved 30 times to get to Portal 2. Valve redefined the first-person shooter with Half-life, and they just did it again in Portal 2. Its like no other game I’ve played, even Portal 1: it has better writing than most comedies, set pieces that are literally like riding a roller coaster, and characters that you’ll spend time loitering after a puzzle just to hear interact with one another. It’s the best first person shooter I think I’ve ever played, and you don’t fire a single bullet in the experience. But, with the PSN down, I imagine most of the country is buying it for Xbox or laptop if they can.
[Edit: Some sites are reporting on speculation that Sony is using Anonymous as a scapegoat to begin charging monthly fees for access to PSN, like Microsoft does with Xbox Live. Interesting conspiracy theory, but it isn’t true, because Qriocity, Sony’s content distribution system for movies and music, is also down.]
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