In response to a post about the PSN cyber attack on the official Capcom forums, Capcom Senior VP Christian Svensson responded that he is ??”frustrated and upset by it for a number of reasons.” From a gamer’s point of view, Svensson is angry that he can’t “play games online on PS3” as he normally does. Moreover, there’s that little matter of personal and credit card information possibly being compromised.
The SVP is also unable to purchase things on the PSN, which leads nicely into the larger problem faced by his employer. He stated that the outage is “obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget.” Yikes. The incident could also affect fans of Capcom games because those “are funds we rely on to bring new games to market”. The publisher is surely still enjoying plenty of incoming cash flows from other sources, but that kind of opportunity lost has got to take its toll.
Mr. Svensson went on to mention that he supposes the hackers responsible have indeed succeeded at punishing Sony for some “perceived injustice”. However, because they’re also punishing millions of other consumers and businesses”, he says that it is outside of the realm of possibility “to be sympathetic to their cause.”
I could not agree more with that statement. All of this damage to corporations and innocent individuals stems from some sort of severely misplaced juvenile sense of self-righteousness. It is reprehensible to punish all of those parties because an entity legally protected its own interests. Not to mention that much of our staff enjoys playing PlayStation games online, and this interruption of service just plain sucks.
[Sources: Capcom-Unity and Edge]
[Images courtesy of Wire and Logo Types.]
