Sony out(r)age and PR blunders
As I’m sure you all know, Sony’s PS3 original (fat) console suffered from a worldwide outage on the evening of Feb 28, 2010. PS3 slim units were unaffected.
According to non-Sony sources, there is a problem with the clock on the CPU that runs the front of the console (power, eject, etc.). This problem is preventing players from being able to access neither downloaded (and paid-for) content nor offline games. Unplugging your unit from your network, like these goggles, does nothing. Apparently the PS3 slim units don’t have the same CPU that the fat units do, and are working fine. According to @jeffgerstmann from GiantBomb: “Is now the appropriate time to tell you that my PS3 Slim has been working perfectly through all this madness?”
For me, the real story in all of this is Sony’s main PR team’s inability to keep fans/users/customers up to date on what’s going on. Have a look at the above screenshot (click it to see larger). You can see that PlayStation’s Twitter feed was last updated 13 hours ago with a message reading basically, “if we find out anything, we’ll let you know”.
Meanwhile, PlayStation Europe’s latest tweet was 1 hour ago (at this time of writing), saying, “We will update you the second we have some news”.
While it’s excellent that PlayStation EU’s team is on the ball and issuing updates, what I find weird is that there isn’t an overarching team that provides messages to both outlets 24/7. The main team should be firing out a consistent and same-messaged updates (as limited or information-free as they are) at least once an hour.
This issue isn’t just a broken controller - it’s a massive, international outage that affects a lot of players. It’s affecting players who want to play offline, or play games that have no online component at all (BioShock 1, for example).
Sony’s inability to communicate with the world is going to have a few repercussions:
- They are going to lose sales. Can’t quantify this at all, but with consumers dreading Toyotas because of lack of quality and communication with the public, this PSN outage isn’t going to look good for them.
- Sony looks incompetent. Not only does it look like they aren’t able to fix their own equipment, but it also looks like they aren’t capable (or interested) in communicating fixes, updates, workarounds, etc. with their customers.
- More importantly, users who are looking for info, updates, ANYTHING are going to be looking online for it and maybe relying on non-Sony sources of information. They’re going to go to the most popular blog they can find (welcome!), find some bits of info, and start removing batteries from their consoles, voiding warranties, and possibly getting hurt.
What’s weirder about the whole thing is that I’m sure the lack of updates coming from Sony has to do with time zones. Europe has a leg up on the rest of us and will post a times that the USA team cannot. But the USA reaches into the Eastern time zone. Fans in New York who wake up at 8am should be able to get updates from Sony as soon as they log onto their machines.
Here’s a lesson for Sony that we learned the fourth time we live streamed an episode of The GAMES DAY Podcast. Not all of your users are located where you are. Saying something’s happening at 8:30pm leaves out users in another time zone (in our case, the West coast of the USA) who tune in three hours late to see your show. Assuming your users can wait to find out what’s happening to their gaming consoles for three hours while your team gets out of bed and gets to work isn’t going to cut it.
All of that aside, the bigger group of people that are affected by the outage are game developers who use the PS3 fat units as their development or test consoles. Hopefully no one wants to test a game, commit a build, or otherwise do work. This outage will result in the loss of thousands of dollars while testers and employees either sit around and wait for fixes to come, or run out to stores and buy PS3 slims.
Maybe it’s a massive effort on Sony’s part to get people to adopt PS3 slim as their main or new consoles? Regardless, when Sony releases their yearly numbers, be sure to completely discount whatever spike occurs in PS3 slims as the values will have been skewed by this event.
Through this whole thing I also realized that there is no Sony Canada PlayStation team on Twitter. Maybe I’m missing something.
Update: Sony has posted something. Kotaku has more.
