PSN outage costing Capcom 'hundreds of thousands, if not millions,' exec says
A Capcom-Unity forum user received a surprisingly frank response from senior VP Christian "Sven" Svensson when he asked the executive, "Do you have anything to say about the ordeal going down with hackers messing with [Sony] and stealing information from their servers?" Does he ever!
Svensson, who said he was "frustrated and upset" by last month's breach and subsequent outage, offered a two-fold response, first addressing the question from his consumer perspective. "I also play games online on PS3, which I can't do ... and likely my personal information is also compromised," he lamented. "Secondly I like to buy things in the PlayStation [Store] and that I can't do right now" -- not to mention play Capcom's pair of DRM-protected PSN games offline.
While the gamer in Svensson seems to have a surefire back-up plan (his post signature notes he's currently playing Portal 2 on PC), his corporate officer side has less wiggle room to weather the outage. "On a related note, as an executive responsible for running a business, the resulting outage obviously costing us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in revenue that were planned for within our budget," he added. "These are funds we rely on to bring new games to market for our fans."
Svensson made no mention of any specific delays, cancellations or business restructuring that might result from the revenue shortfall, nor did he suggest how Capcom might look to recoup the lost revenue. His response also avoided any critique of Sony's handling of the situation, and instead stayed on topic: "CAPCOM- How do you feel about the SONY Hackers?" asks the thread's title.
"In short, the hackers appear to be trying to 'punish' Sony for some perceived injustice, and they've been effective in that I suppose," Svensson concluded. "But they're also punishing millions of other consumers and businesses which makes it impossible to be sympathetic to their 'cause.'"
[Pictured: Capcom PSN Storefront; source: Capcom-Unity]
