Sony Could Face Developer Exodus On PSN 186
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.
Try something new (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Good for them. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Downtime? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I think this is broadly right. Personally, I probably won't stop buying from the PSN altogether, but I certainly will move to using pre-paid points cards rather than letting them have the details of my (new, just replaced - thanks Sony) credit card. That adds a potential layer of inconvenience to purchases which will certainly make me less inclined towards impulse buys.
Plus, as an owner of both a PS3 and a 360, it's yet another reason to favour the latte when making decisions on which platform to buy multi-platform games for. Unless there were glaring technical differences in the PS3 version's favour (a la FF13), I was already inclined towards the 360 on the basis that I prefer the controller and have more friends who also own 360s than PS3s (and hence a larger Xbox Live friends list). After seeing the PSN's dire resilience demonstrated, these decisions are going to become pretty much no-brainers in future. So I'm only likely to buy single-platform exclusives for the PS3 from now on.
Meanwhile, developers inclined towards giving Sony those exclusives are going to be thinking their decisions through very carefully. After all, the PSN has been painful to a lot of game developers - not just those who have seen PSN launches postponed or games launch with multiplayer not functioning, but also those who have DLC as part of their business model (which, like it or not, is most of them these days). Bioware haven't been shifting any Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2 DLC on the PS3 since the PSN went down. Gust haven't been selling any Ar Tonelico Qoga DLC. Black Ops: Escalation? Forget it. Now in some cases, customers will just postpone their purchases until the PSN store comes back up (which is likely to be the final component to do so), but in other cases, they'll have "moved on" from the game in question and the sale will be lost forever.
There's been a lot of hyperbole about the impacts of the PSN outage and data leak. I find it very hard to imagine large numbers of people rushing to trade in their PS3s. In fact, largely due to a lack of new releases that have interested me since Portal 2, I've spent the last few weeks using my PS3 way more than I normally would as I work through my backlog of games I've been meaning to finish. I played Killzone 3's campaign through (and was very impressed by how well the PS Move controls work). I sank 40 hours into Ar Tonelico Qoga (one of the few Japanese RPGs of this console generation to be actually good). And I finally got around to finishing the first Uncharted game. The PS3 has a large installed base now and, after a slow start, a decent library of games. In the immediate future, it isn't going anywhere.
The damage for Sony will, I suspect, be more subtle and long-term. There will be changes to how customers spend their money in the PSN store that could prove painful over time. And there will be damage to Sony's commercial relationships with the wider industry that could take years to repair. Compare how Nintendo managed to annoy a huge chunk of the industry (including, critically, Squaresoft) through sheer arrogance during the transition from the SNES to the N64, with the result that despite the SNES's dominance, the N64 and Gamecube died a slow death due to lack of third party developer interest (a problem which still afflicts the Wii to some extent). Sony are running a high risk of finding themselves in a similar situation now - you mess with your partners' bottom lines at your peril.
Re:It Seems To Me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Try something new (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
In most competitive games there is no bank of dedicated servers -- one of the player's machines is the "server". Why not simply allow unranked matches between peers?
For example, "Unranked Matches > Custom Match > Join Server > Enter the IP of the game server to join."
Thus, when PSN or XBL is unavailable (which has happened for maintenance, it did piss me off) the players will still be able to play. In PSN's case, since it's already free, WHY NOT? It's not like they'll be losing money by doing so.
The secret joke of the "online" is that it's just a DRM mechanism designed to keep people from playing games -- Eg: I can't play Halo2 online in a custom match, even though all of my friends have started the game, and our XBoxes are talking to eachother (party chat) and all of our consoles know that the others' have loaded the game -- we can verify this by looking at the Halo2 icon next to our names on the friends list...
So, then we fire up OpenVPN and join a system link game over the Internet, and we're all playing Halo2 online -- XBL was not even needed for this -- We're just using it to coordinate our play-times and for the voice chat feature.
If you've ever seen "Selecting New Host" or other similar message, you'll realize that the XBL and PNS is actually just made up of the machines everyone purchased (Host == Server). Only a small number of "matchmaking" and/or media / score tracking & DRM servers exist in comparison to control how the masses play their games. In the case of Halo2 (and all original Xbox games) they've artificially obsoleted the games' Internet play features -- They want you to play the new games, not enjoy the older games.
Personally, I won't buy a game that doesn't support system link (LAN play) -- VPN stands for Virtual Player Network to me.
Sony is in denial (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Try something new (Score:4, Insightful)
Multiplayer *is* new. Or at least the idea of making a game that only plays online is. It is perfectly reasonable to make a game that is designed to be played online. Think of how boring WoW or Eve Online (I'm not a big console player) would be in single player mode
Considering that Eve Online is just a 3D realtime Trade Wars 2002 [wikipedia.org] (which is a game from 1984, not 2002), and considering the countless other MUDs, online-only games aren't that new of an idea.