PlayStation Network hacked, User Info stolen!

oh snap!

I'm guessing that someone at Sony got one of those viruses that pops up the "Oh Noes!! You've got a virus!" warnings and prompts you to buy their "anti-virus" software (which is actually another virus/trojan) to get rid of the virus. Sony bought the "anti-virus" software, and that is the extent of their protection.

and this is what happens when a company doesnt have a good security system in place.

Just an FYI but I've read that SONY has basically said PSN AND SOE Online PC systems are down "indefinably".

Epic Fail.

I think the fact that they literally didn't have it back up within a day or two goes to show just how utterly borked their security is. The only way to stop their servers being hacked is to not turn them on.

That's pretty sad.

Sounds like they've basically killed SOE as a company then.

I imagine that for all their MMOs they'll lose a huge number of subscribers, a couple of days outage I imagine is tolerable but over two weeks, that will be beyond tolerable for probably a huge chunk of players.

As mentioned their subscriber based MMOs were already bleeding subscribers at a high rate or suffered from already low numbers about the only ones they're going to have left is the free to play ones and even then they're more aimed at children, so two weeks of outage more than likely means that they're going to move elsewhere.

I will also point out that working in games retail I've seen a massive upshot in the sale of Xbox 360s (infact 3 customers were all friends buying one so they could play the big name FPS game online with each other).

Since playing online is now a big part of gaming, the lacking of the online component for the PS3 for what appears to be atleast a month, if not longer, will likely cause a lot of people to drop the console itself.

Good news, folks. It looks like Sony is now planning to have everything back by the end of the month!

*looks at calendar*

Oh dear. That's still a ways off, isn't it. Well, it's good news for all the other online game companies, I guess.

Yup...that'll basically kill Planetside, DCUO and whatever other online subscriber based MMOs they have, the whole idea of an MMO is to get people hooked and logging in every day to play, forcing people to go 'cold turkey' for over a month will usually mean that they will drop the product fairly sharpish.

While it will have a big impact on the regular Sony side, the biggest impact is going to be on SOE side to the point where I reckon the actual service/section of the company itself will be shut down by Sony come towards the end of the year.

Lets be honest, they've never had big hitters and what little they had left will likely be closed down.

Shame really as I enjoyed their superhero MMO but the endgame content SUCKED something fierce.

EQ WAS a big hitter, I wouldn't say it is now unfortunately.

Mind you that's partially because the goalposts have changed with regards a 'big hitter MMO' when the beast was unleashed by Blizzard.

For example I while CoH isn't a big hitter in the MMO market, it's a big hitter in the Superhero sub-genre due to the other two suffering from their own, much larger, problems and coming up against an MMO with seven years worth of content.

Well colour me surprised.

I retract my previous statement, I honestly thought EQ and EQ2 had less subscribers than they actually do (like 50k sub numbers).

Well in that case there is some hope for SOE yet.

It is true. Everquest at least up until 2009 STILL had more active accounts than City of Heroes. I don't have later numbers for them so I don't know if that still holds true, plus the Station Pass that Sony offers muddles the numbers a bit.


At the time CoH came out, developer discussions on the Beta boards indicated that 100K was the "break point" for success on a MMO. That would allow the development money to be paid back to investors in 18 months or so after launch. Which is about the longest many investors would be willing to see a return on their money.

These days, the target number is probably 200K for a new MMO.

And I was more questioning the use of the word "never".



-np

To be fair, I didn't know the EQ series were SOE games, I've always thought they were made by someone else. Just goes to show, one should research before making posts.

Though I willl question Durraken's chart atleast to being whether it is recent or not.

Still stand by that the month long outage of SOE based MMOs is probably going to be a game breaker for a decent chunk of their subscribers and already failing MMOs like DCUO are effectively either going to be killed stone dead by it or put on the barest of life support.

Yah, that chart seems a little dated. Dofus for example has passed the half-million active subscriber mark. EVE Online is approaching that point - in fact, EVE passed the 300K mark in 2009.





-k

It seems that they're is experiencing an infinite crisis.

Apparently Sony will have ALL services back online by the 31st. Online play could be back sooner. I doubt Sony wants to have online gaming down for the rest of the month.