Capcon Senior Vice President Christian Svensson says the PlayStation Network downtime is costing the company truckloads of money that it was really counting on for future development.
The PlayStation Network nightmare has put the screws to Sony in an untold numbers of ways, but while it was presumably the intended target of the hackers who breached the system, it’s definitely not suffering alone. Among the companies caught in the splash is Capcom, and Svennson’s none to happy about it.
“I’m frustrated and upset by [the PSN outage] for a number of reasons. As a consumer, I also play games online on PS3, which I can’t do… and likely my personal information is also compromised. Secondly I like to buy things in the PlayStation store and that I can’t do right now,” he wrote on the Capcom Unity blog.
“On a related note, as an executive responsible for running a business, the resulting outage obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget. These are funds we rely on to bring new games to market for our fans,” he continued. “In short, the hackers appear to be trying to ‘punish’ Sony for some perceived injustice, and they’ve been effective in that I suppose. But they’re also punishing millions of other consumers and businesses which makes it impossible to be sympathetic to their ’cause’.
It’s a fair point, although I suspect that earning the sympathy of the public wasn’t one of the goals of the attack. Still, if it’s easy to forget that the collateral damage resulting from this attack affects a great many more companies than Sony, it’s also forgivable because it’s such an unprecedented mess. The full impact of the PSN downtime may not be felt until long after the service is finally restored and that could still be at least a few weeks away; in the meantime, a more immediate barometer of its effect will likely be seen in tomorrow’s release of Brink. Given the strong focus on multiplayer, the absence of online capabilities will probably be very bad news indeed for the PS3 version of the game.
