Sony Could Face Developer Exodus On PSN

donniebaseball23 writes "As the PlayStation Network outage continues, developers are feeling the economic pinch. There's been no word from Sony on whether they'll compensate companies who produce games for PSN, but Capcom has already said it's losing potentially 'millions' from the downtime. Worse yet, developers who rely on PSN revenues may jump ship if they aren't compensated, warns Dylan Cuthbert, creator of popular PSN game PixelJunk. 'I have a feeling they [Sony] are thinking about doing something or they will lose developers, which of course is pretty bad for them,' he said." While a major shift away from the PS3 is unlikely — downtime or not, developers don't want to lock themselves out of such a big piece of the market — it does have undeniable negative effects on some companies. For example, Bethesda's FPS Brink, which focuses heavily on multiplayer, launched without that capability for PS3 users. You can bet Microsoft will use this outage as a selling point for exclusivity or Xbox-first arrangements.

Comments

Sony dug their own grave

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just sold my POS PS3 at a bargain basement price, and I will never be buying another piece of hardware or software from them ever again. PSN fiasco isn't the only reason to hate Sony, just another in a long line.

Good riddance

Re:Sony dug their own grave

[Colonel Korn]

I know I'm selling Portal2 this weekend due to the PSN outage, it's a shame as Valve promised the PS3 experience to be the best out of all the versions and now I'll never know what it could have been!

I think the claim that the PS3 version would be best was entirely based on it coming with a free copy of the PC version of the game, which is certainly the best playing option.

Re:Change is gonna come

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a precision : in fact Dragon Age does not require a connection to play, and the servers were not offline. The real trouble was that if you are online, Dragon Age does connect to the servers and authenticate your DLC. And the servers went havoc. So once it messed up with the authentication, you just were screwed even offline; and indeed it made little difference.

The most awful DRM incarnation award winner is still in my opinion the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 when it was released, for which a connection was mandatory during all the play time (and which paused/exited if ever the connection dropped).

Re:Consoles are inherently evil.

[SCPRedMage]

Actually, TF2 works just fine on LAN play without a net connection. You may have problems with the ONLINE multiplayer, but the game will still work on a LAN. Hell, if Valve does eventually shut down everything related to the game, you should still be able to play online, albeit with online default weapons.

Re:Try something new

[mjwx]

Why not just make the games single player stand alone and ADD the networking stuff on as another mode. That way, the games don't require PSN for people to play them. Or use your own 3rd party server which would probably be even worse.

You mean like PC games have been doing since the 90's?

How novel.

MS/Sony dont want to do that because they miss out on all the revenue of being the only online service available. "But PSN was free" I hear you ask, well it was free for you but not for the developers who have to pay licensing fees for it which came out of the RRP of the game you bought so I guess it wasn't so free (and all that personal information they get from it too).