Over the weekend Sony’s ailing Playstation Network was finally resuscitated and brought back online, to the delight of its long-suffering users. The network had been offline for over three weeks after Sony took it down and was forced to rebuild it from the ground up in response to a massive security breach, which saw the personal details of over 100 million users lifted by hackers.
Sony had promised to give users a free gift when the service was back up as a way of apologising for the disruption, and yesterday Sony posted details of what users can expect to get. Both Playstation 3 and Playstation Portable users will be able to select two games from a list of five and download them to keep, as well as getting access to Sony’s premium service, Playstation Plus, for thirty days (existing subscribers get a free month plus a free day for every day the network was down).
The problem here is that Playstation Plus is a walled garden of exclusive content, so once the thirty days is up, users will find themselves locked out and unable to access anything they download in this period. The games on offer also seem to be taken from the bargain bin, with many users complaining they already own the titles. Predictably the frustrated Playstation userbase has not been completely receptive to the offer. Here are some choice comments from the Playstation Blog post –
Are you kidding me? I will only get 1 free game then (Wipeout HD), since I have all the rest. That’s what I get for being a good customer.
So will you continue to insult your most loyal customers or will you offer some alternatives for those that already owns those games?
You’re going to get lots of unhappy people who own all or many of those games already. Also the thirty days of PS Plus is a crock – don’t give me a month of crappy upsell
Playstation staff are answering questions in the comments of the post (good luck to them – its up to 1,000+ comments in less than twelve hours), and the company line seems to be “You can’t please everyone.”
The one positive for Sony at this point is that things can hardly get any worse.
