In terms of today’s gaming, online game-play is one of the most important components. Think about all the stereotypes associated with gamers today: Angry gamers throwing their controllers at the virtual avatar who just knifed them in the back.
Now, think about what would happen if the entire network that enables people to play every single game on an entire next generation system suddenly went down. No games can be played and no games can be purchased online.
Add in the fact that personal information attached to your account on that system — including your name, address, email address, birth date, login and handle, as well as your password — have also been stolen by an unnamed party, and you’ll get what happened to Playstation 3 users on the Playstation Network between April 17 through 19.
Sony was mum on the subject until almost a week after the outage. Then the bomb was dropped: Hackers have your personal information, and we can’t say for sure if credit card numbers were also compromised in the anonymous attack.
The lack of information up until April 26 is absolutely unacceptable. They made cute, little updates to the Playstation Blog about the outage, saying that they are hard at work on bringing back PSN, but the fact that personal information was compromised was never mentioned. They admitted there was an attack and that they cut off access to PSN immediately after they discovered that there was an “external intrusion,” but they left people in the dark for a week about the single most important detail: what exactly happened and what they can do about it.
The fact that access to PSN is free is always a huge selling point for the Playstation 3, but I would rather pay for Xbox Live and get great, lag-free game play with efficient updates that will constantly improve my console experience. I also think that this would have never happened on Xbox Live.
With access to Xbox Live being $60 a year, there’s no way that Microsoft would ever let something like this happen. Play Station Network is free. Once it comes back, gamers will grumble and complain, but they’ll be back. Xbox Live, on the other hand… The people that readily paid their $60 membership fee will not be so eager once renewal time comes around again. This is the service that let hackers get into their system, so they take down the network for two weeks or more, and then charge you for it! Why support that? Many people wouldn’t.
That said, I’d be wary about PSN from now on. The way they dropped the ball on letting their consumers know the truth on what was actually happening to their accounts was completely unacceptable, as well as the unexplained downtime with no time line as to when access will be restored. But I’ll be back. After all, it’s free!
Courtney Takakuwa is a senior journalism major and contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
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