This is What Irony Tastes Like: Capcom and the PSN Outage | Hacker News Reader

This is What Irony Tastes Like: Capcom and the PSN Outage

shamusyoung.com

197 pointsrflrob29 comments

That said, the assumption is that anonymous was responsible for the actions.

Its interesting to see how that assumptions, uttered by Sony, is now taken as fact.

More than the DRM implications, the playing out of the PR game here is interesting. Should be an interesting case of something being repated enough becoming the truth. From here it should land up to Anonymous are credit card thieves.

It's also interesting that this utterance by Sony has shifted the whole discussion away from their own security failures.

Sony, in blaming Anonymous, has asked theem to prove a negative -- that they did NOT hack PSN. The onus isn't on anonymous to prove a negative. Sony knows they can't. It's just an effective way to shift focus on this issue away from their failure to protect customer data.

This is the most frustrating part of the whole debacle. Sure - whoever hacked PSN carries blame, but an equal amount of blame lies directly on Sony's shoulders for not putting adequate protections in place.

To be fair anonymous let it be known they were attacking Sony. So when an attack is successful, who is your first suspect? Given that anonymous is just a random bunch of people on the internet it could have been another group that used info gained by anon or just used them as cover.

Kinda reminds me of the Amazon outage. Except that they aren't apologizing. And they are looking to blame anyone but themselves.

Shamus Young is an excellent games blogger, and does the occasional interesting post on graphics programming and procedural content generation. Have a scroll through the backlog!

(I'm not Shamus, I just follow his RSS feed :P)

I assume there will have to be some compensation? Some games that come out around the time of the outage will probably never attract the amount of online players they otherwise would have.

Compensation for whom then?

Compensation from Sony to the game makers. I agree, quite a few newly launched titles on the PS3 are likely to suffer loss of sales that will never be recovered. Like how a movie that makes most of it's money on the opening weekend.

Have you ever read the EULA for a proprietary platform? Not only do they disclaim liabilities, they also threaten to take a kidney & first born should you so much as dare think about holding them responsible.

Legal agreements between companies for material contracts look nothing like an EULA.

Hence it being an End User License Agreement.

What I find weird is that the DRM mentioned for Capcom's games applies only to the PS3 versions, as far as I am aware (At least it is with Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Final Fight Arcade.) The 360 version has none of that, as does the PC Version of Rearmed at least. Kind of makes me wonder why they chose to selectively place it on the PS3 only.

Cached version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3ZXFyRk...

yet people buy more capcom games than clicks on this site ads. /thread

see "why I get my entertainment via bittorrent" thread to understand why this rant is pointless.

This seems unrelated to "why I get my entertainment via bittorrent." In this case, Capcom sold games and decided that they shouldn't be usable when PSN is down, then complained that they were unusable when PSN was down. In the other case, it is impossible for a consumer to pay for content, so he acquires it without paying for it.

The consumer hardly hear that they are complaining.

The consumer probably was affected WAY BEFORE. or do you think no one ever was without cable one rainy day and decided "ah, let's play some street fighter instead of browsing reddit... dammit! i can't play?!"?

90% of the consumers that were affected by that outage were already affected before. The outage is just the cherry on top of the cake.

But people will continue to buy the game.

Way back I bought star craft from Blizzard. just to find out that battle.net servers were uselesely slow in Brazil at the beginning. A few weeks later i was playing on some bootlegged server.

Blizzard still got the money. But since now I was having so much trouble to play my original game on a 'pirate' server and talking with 'pirates' they never got my money for the broodwar expansion. It was easier to log into an FTP than to go to a store (i'm talking about pre-download age for games here)

Deleted comment

The relevance to HN comes from:

1.) Sony was hacked, people here care about what effects that has

2.) It's a piece criticising DRM, which is a subject of interest to a technical crowd

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No, it's not a place to discuss things of interest to startups. It's a place to discuss things of interest to the people who are interested in startups. Often that will be the same thing, but often it won't. To quote the guidelines:

  Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

And how can you say something should be on the front page but not at the top? Either it's of interest or not, and while that is subjective, you can't just decide that something shouldn't be of interest to as many people as it is.

If there wasn't so much piracy affecting sales, there wouldn't be a need for those anti-piracy measures. PC gaming is practically non-existent with the exception of Blizzard.

So I see you've mastered the fine art of hyperbole, or perhaps just ignorance? For example, between 2008 and 2009, PC game sales increased from $11 billion to $13.1 billion. PC retail game sales are shrinking, but digital downloads have more than offset that decline. And yeah, sure, Blizzard makes a ton of money, but there seems to be a lot of companies in the PC gaming space making money, see: Valve, StarDock, PopCap, even little guys like Mojang.

I think you are misinformed about the health of PC gaming. Many major titles are released for the PC every year, and it is fairly rare for there to be a major release for the XBox that does not also come out for the PC.

I'm starting to think that I'm reading Digg here. Please reassure me. Where is the value?

I agree Keyle. This is exactly what I said above and got greyed out for (deleted post above). I don't have time to read useless crap on here. I come here for good, useful content about startups and tech.

HN is very easy to shill vote up on own posts though, and I suggest thats what is happening here. A large part of its quality came from its obscurity.

It's becoming famous and its time to make a new one.

> A large part of its quality came from its obscurity.

> It's becoming famous and its time to make a new one.

You joined less than a month ago, and you have a karma average of 1.59. You do realize that you are part of the influx of people who are bringing down the quality of the site? Pot, kettle, yadda, yadda...

Genuinely curious, if you don't have time to read stuff like this on here why bother clicking? Seems like you could solve your problem and others by not clicking.

The quality aspect comes from the people who participate on here, not its obscurity.

BTW, stories about a large company getting hacked is relevant to a site called Hacker News.

Nobody said that you have to read the top articles. If the title looks like 'something from digg/reddit' to you, skip the article, and the thread. Complaining about the article's relevance to HN contributes nothing to the discussion. If you are unhappy with HN, nobody is forcing you to stay

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