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.

It Seems To Me...

[Weaselgrease]

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.

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.

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.

Re:Try something new

[yarnosh]

Um, how old are you? 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, for example. It just wouldn't make sense to plays those games standalone. But that's what makes them so appealing. If you want a standalone game, there are plenty that play just fine that way. To say that all games should be like that though is kind of silly. As for not using PSN, that's a bit overreactive, don't you think? I'm not a PS3 developer, but I imagine leveraging PSN for online play cuts down on dev time significantly. You'd be dumb not to take advantage of that. Outages like PSN is experiences are just not typical. To base your technical decisions around it is not wise.

Re:Sony dug their own grave

[Anonymous Coward]

What he means by "trust" is that, for example, in some of the more complex puzzles, one person will be flying through a set of portals and the other person is required to place a new portal in precisely the right location to send the first person flying across the map, and it's really easy to screw your teammate. I played it recently with my brother, and you better believe we fucked with each other at first. But it is true co-op in the sense that you must work together in order to progress. It is impossible for one person to do all the work. It's refreshing. The co-op part is easily the best part of the game. With four portals to work with, the puzzles get more devilish as well.

Re:Sony is in denial

[citizenr]

They think this was all about stealing credit cards.

Wonder if anyone shorted a massive amount of Sony stock before the news broke.