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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.
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.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
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
I remember the good ol' days when having internet access made a game more fun, rather than it being a necessity just to play at all. Maybe this kind of thing will 'encourage' a return to that way of planning, if only a little.
Hopefully events like the PSN outage will give companies pause in their rush to move everything online. Only a few weeks ago DragonAge players found themselves unable to play their single player game as it required an online login and the servers were down. Hopefully it will force companies to come up with better solutions, sadly it will probably just force them to alter their EULAs to avoid any and all liability.
Sortof like all those companies relying on Facebook these days for their customer contact.
Stupid, stupid stupid, to put all your eggs in someone else's basket.
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Downtime? I'd think the developers would be more worried about how much smaller the market is for the PSN now.
I can't possibly the only one who decided instantly not to buy from Sony any more. (Okay, I admit, Sony-exclusive stuff will still probably draw me in, if it's good. But anything cross-platform is going to be bought elsewhere.) There must be more who decided all this pain (including the insults like the 30 days of free PSN+) is not worth paying for Sony stuff any more.
And the security issues? Obviously Sony doesn't know much about security. Their system stayed un-hacked only so long as they left Linux on the PS3 for the hackers to be happy. Sure, someone was working on hacking the PS3 through Linux, but he wasn't there. Immediately afterwards, people started hacking for real. And of course the online networks both got hacked... 1 of them WHILE they were fixing the first. They should have been aware.
No, if I were developing for the PSN (which I can't, because you basically have to be established before they'll consider you) then I'd been looking for greener pastures for more reasons than just the downtime.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
They think this was all about stealing credit cards. A heist that large though plummets in value as it is too well known and the cards too readily canceled. I would imagine the market value for the stolen cards to be far less than a typical heist that doesn't become publicly known.
I really think this about punishing Sony for doing evil things. Whether you want to pick their DRM infatuation, pursuite of GeoHot, removal of other OS and any number of other things doesn't matter. Somebody was trying to send a message to Sony that in the real world a court room victory bought with the best lawyers you can find can still have a very real cost.
Estimates that put the cost of this in the billion dollar range have been making the news lately. Sony, you just need to ask yourself, was it worth a billion dollars, the loss of public goodwill and a number of pissed of developers? Whether or not Sony will stop playing hardball and start being the corporate bully is doubtful. In the end whoever did this will likely end up in prison, the only question is what lesson did Sony learn from this?
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.
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They could face developer exodus ... but it probably won't happen. ... but it probably won't happen.
They could face customer exodus
My bet is that a year from now, this issue will have be a distant memory for the vast majority of people and PSN will be ticking along as normal.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who would like to see these issues cause Sony to crash and burn - but past history (with things like the rootkit) has shown that it is unlikely to happen.
Sorry, but just being realistic.
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The problem is centralized servers; you shouldn't need to rely on any company's server to play; every online game (except maybe MMOs) should come with a dedicated server binary, not only to avoid downtime as to prevent forced shutdowns (like the MGS3 servers, who were shutdown less than a year after the game was released).
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The way it works is that you still save to the hard drive within the game. PSN+ subscribers just have an option in the dash to back that save up to Sony's servers, where it can then be downloaded onto another of your PS3s (because you've got lots of them, haven't you?) and still used. As supposed to doing exactly the same with a USB memory stick, or what have you.
Basically, it's nothing a PC owner with a Dropbox account couldn't achieve.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
developers who rely on PSN revenues may jump ship if they aren't compensated
I was going to hack my firmware and distribute my PSN-capable homebrew software, but now that Sony has shown they care nothing for its users, I'll take my business elsewhere.
Yes, but Steam doesn't let people *buy* games while offline, which is what Capcom is rightly angry about right now. If Steam went down for 3 weeks, you bet your ass game developers would be as angry at Valve as they are at Sony now.
Being able to play games offline is a total non-sequitur. Both PSN and Xbox Live Arcade let you do that-- *once you've purchased the game*.
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PS3 and Xbox 360 play different types of games from Wii. So different, it's almost a different market altogether. You couldn't replace an PS3 gaming environment on a Wii... but you could get awful close with an Xbox 360,
(For non-game features, though, like Netflix, this could be a boon to Nintendo as it is to Microsoft.)
These kids don't seem to realize that Microsoft has a much richer history of evil than Sony does.
Microsoft was evil 20 years ago, and pretty neutral now. Sony's evil this instant, and has been insistently evil for the last 5 years. Nobody who regularly plays a PS3 remembers IE4 vs. Netscape, or that Stacker thing, or the look-and-feel lawsuit with Apple. That stuff's ancient history. Their experience of Microsoft is Windows 2000 and up, generally ok products executed in a non-evil way. (Only the geekiest of geeks have heard of, or care about, the ODF thing, that's the only "evil" thing I can think of MS doing recently. That pales in comparison to Adobe, or even to Apple.)
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