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

Change is gonna come

[senorpoco]

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.

Re:Try something new

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Or a completely new console.

Sony is in denial

[onyxruby]

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?

Let's be realistic here...

[Mr_Silver]

They could face developer exodus ... but it probably won't happen.
They could face customer exodus ... but it probably won't happen.

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.