The key quote from this article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, noted over at EQ2 Wire:
Rodriguez added that Sony Online Entertainment’s network would be shut down until Friday and possibly longer. The company has contacted the FBI to investigate the attack.
And if the shut down bleeds into people’s weekend free time, their weekend game time, then people will start looking for something else to play.
As Syp sort of asked, can SOE recover from something like that?
There is the player base in general to consider. Surely the hard core, long time players will return, but I wonder how fragile the EverQuest II Extended player base is. Dose free to play’s low bar to entry also imply a low threshold to abandonment?
Then there is the who question of confidence in Sony, SOE, SCEA, et al., in holding our personal data. Should Sony, as Cringley and Lum suggest, outsource the whole thing to the likes of PayPal or PlaySpan?
(PlaySpan is now owned by VISA, which I think gives it the legitimacy to be considered. Games like World of Tanks use it already.)
Or will we all forget about this in a month or two and things will be business as usual… until it happens again?
Addendum: Develop has posted an excellent time line of the Sony PSN and SOE hacking saga.
(I recall all the grief I got for not wanting to give EA-Mythic a credit card number in order to take advantage of their 10 free days offer. Doesn’t seem so unreasonable now, does it?)
The Ancient Gaming Noob 