Industry will move on from PSN crisis

The PSN downtime has cost the games industry millions of pounds in lost revenue, while new releases have hit shelves untested.

Yet Kalypso’s new business development director – and digital specialist – Charlie Barrett says this short term pain will ultimately benefit the games market.

If measures are put in place, customer confidence will come back because ultimately it’s the content that is going to win out,” he told MCV.

There might be a little short-term damage, but longer term I think people will work this through. And I think the market will benefit from it, with improved security. So ultimately the consumer will benefit from this. It will probably increase the market for security – I’m sure there are companies that are going to grow from this.”

Capcom’s senior VP Christian Svensson admitted last week that the cost of the PSN downtime for the publisher amounted to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.”

Meanwhile, one major developer told MCV that its upcoming PS3 game will need to be patched following its release, as the multiplayer mode has not been fully tested.

Namco Bandai’s game director for Tekken Katsuhiro Harada admitted the firm had been hurt by the situation surrounding the PlayStation Network.

He said: The company has been affected because of the PSN downtime. We heard that [Street Fighter developer] Yoshinori Ono couldn’t release some of the content he wanted because of the downtime.

Maybe some other developers planned to use some of the profits that came from downloadable content to further their game developments.”