PSN Hacked: The Return

There can’t be many people who haven’t heard about the current PlayStation Network woes. It’s a hugely negative story for PlayStation which is getting attention from national mainstream press and causing competitors to gloat.

We tried to lighten the mood slightly with a few clumsy jokes on Friday but now it’s three days later and the PSN still hasn’t risen. We’re worried you might be getting a bit too frustrated and unhappy so we thought we’d look at what improvements might be implemented while Sony has its servers switched off.

Increased security. This one is a certainty, Sony haven’t given much information about what they’re doing and this is the one thing they’ve been clear about. The new PSN will be stronger and more resilient to the kind of attacks which brought the old PSN down. More security is always a good thing, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of actually using the service.

More servers. This is very possible and would definitely be welcomed. While the PSN is down, they could be adding to their servers so that capacity is increased and the whole thing works more smoothly in the future. This attack on the PSN might be the thing that finally gets us stable multiplayer launch weekends on the beautiful black box along with even faster download speeds and updates that are quick enough to largely silence those that constantly complain about their frequency.

New features. People have taken the opportunity to postulate that Sony might be using the down time to pack in new features – specifically, cross game chat – to the Network services. We think that this is unlikely. It is possible, however, that newly strengthened servers might be better able to handle increased traffic and that might make new features more likely in the near future. We would expect to see this sort of thing in a big firmware update at a high point in the media calendar – like around E3 time.

Compensation. Like it or not, this situation has been a PR disaster for Sony. We’re fairly sure that down time on the network is accounted for when you sign up but customers still have a right to be disappointed that a service they pay for (be it via the initial console purchase, PS+, PSN games that require authentication to run or third party partnerships like LoveFilm, MLB.com, etc) has been missing for so long. One way Sony could help calm the growing outrage is to give something away. To be fair, PlayStation have been very generous with their PS+ service and some heavy discounting recently so we think this is very likely. What they offer their loyal fans is a subject of pure conjecture but we would expect their generosity to be on full display fairly soon after the network hums back into life.

So there we have it, this is all pure speculation at this point but it’s better to speculate on positives than to dwell on the negatives, right? What would you like to see from the new, improved PlayStation Network when it comes back on?