Sony Defends "Welcome Back" Reward Choices

[badducks]

I appreciate the effort of compensation. It's nice to have a company admit they screwed up and give you free stuff in return. They're not obligated to give us anything and I'm impressed at the amount of content. I wasn't expecting much (maybe the $5 compensation for credit card replacements), but free games? I'll take it!

(Just as long as I'm not required to input my credit card details to get it...)

 

[BrotherRool]

InFamous sold it to me alone

I noticed all the titles offered are published or owned by Sony or one of their subsidiaries. Does anyone on the Escapist know is they can use this as a sort of donation or another tax write off? It makes sense that they chose this method instead of giving everyone points since customers could have bought any product and Sony would be forced to pay out of their pocket IF they're allowed to write this off somehow. Just a thought.

It makes sense even without a write-off. Because Sony own them, all they are losing is the money it costs to provide bandwidth, which they'd lose whatever game, and any possible potential sales (even their, they cleverly chose two games with big name sequels, so they might actually bolster sales for new games). If they chose someone else, they'd actually have to pay them for the right to do it and so have to pay the mark-up which allows that company to profit.

+it probably takes less negotiation

 

[Acidwell]

My only problem is that "Welcome Back appreciation program" sounds like something Glados would come up with.

 

[Digikid]

I have a message for these idiotic whiners......SHUT THE FRIG UP!

Sony could have done NOTHING...just flipped the switch and said "There you go.....go nuts" and offered us NOTHING. However they chose to reimburse us with a few games in good faith.

As much as I do not like Sony this is a great thing that they are doing for us.

So take your complaints and stuff them.

 

[Matthew Lynch]

because Sony was asleep at the helm.

Because you work at Sony and know all of their security measures, right? I mean, otherwise that'd be an incredibly ridiculous claim to make, since you'd have now more knowledge on the matter than anyone else.

Its already been confirmed that Sony used out of date security on their PSN servers, hense allowing the breach to occur...I'd call that 'sleeping at the helm'.

 

[wooty]

Let's just face it that people are greedy no matter what you give them. The ones complaining are probably the ones who's lives have been irrepairedly "damaged" by psn being down as they had to leave the house at some point. Maybe they were expecting sonys apology to be the entire catalogue of ps3 games for free, or a unique code to unlock a special level 50 prestige on teh blak opz's (lolrofl1337noob and all the rest of it).

Next, some fool will probably try and sue Sony for offerering free games.

 

[Pearwood]

...Did he just say inFamous is a high quality game?!

I think you're in the minority with that opinion, it was a lot of people's first choice.

I thought the list was really good, it had a title I'd never heard of, a title I'd never got around to checking out but was pretty interested in, two games I'd already played but would consider them the best games PS3 has to offer and Ratchet and Clank which I don't know much about except it's pretty damn popular.

 

[Nexus4]

OK, how about instead of giving them free games. We hire Muhammad Ali to go their place and punch them in the face. This is just like getting a present you didn't want on Christmas, then throwing it back at your parents demanding something different. Seriously, what are these people expecting? I do not think many devs would be too happy about giving their new games away for free, people gotta make a profit you know? Those are high quality titles, of course their old to cut costs; but they are FREE! be grateful for it people.

 

[Matthew Lynch]

-Snip-

One of the few people who's posts held more substance then, "It's free stop crying!"

You know, I had written a post about how funny it was that people are upset that other people aren't happy with the compensation Sony is offering for it's failure in service to it's customers...

But then I realized it's not funny.

It's just horribly sad. And 90% of the sheep saying, "Stop being mad about free stuff." Are the reason why these giant corporations suck so horribly with customer service. Seriously they could quite literally crap on your mother in front of you. And you'd still be polishing their shoes with your tongue.

So sad. Guess I chose a good time to dig into PC gaming. At least there's some semblance of respect there.

I dunno...I experienced the 'respect' of the Comand and Conquer servers who prefer to concider all new players retarded like Command and conqur is some elitist only club...(haven;t played CnC 4 since

I'd say parrots myself, as they can talk and repeat things.... then again they are also prettier, and I don't want to be that kind. So sheep is probably the better term. Particular since these people seem to be happy to be fleeced.

Don't get me wrong. I am not sure if Congress and all these big government institutions need to hop on Sony's ass, particularly all at once, but they are trying to bribe(I don't care if you don't like the term that's exact what they are doing) their customers into forgetting their massive failure happened at all, and then they give this token gesture that's so small that it's insulting.

While this example is extreme to the point of being silly/stupid I still feel this urge to use it.

"I'm sorry I raped you. Here's some ice cream. Forgiven?"

Mind you, somewhat it's the games offered that annoy me,Infamous is about the only one that's good, I imagine it's like 20 bucks now and I already have it. Mostly it's the fact that they are trying to suck up to us, but they still want to be in control. I'm sorry, apologies don't work that way. How about you just give us a discount on anything in the PSN, or a 25-30 ish credit towards anything on PSN. It's still not a massive amount, but it gives us more control.

Honestly I'd say, if the modding debacle had anything to do with this, that Sony's main problem as a company are being massive control freaks, to the point of pissing off paying customers.

I agree...what the sheep don;t realise is that SONY...FUCKED...UP. They are legally required to guard your info...all your info against theft...and they failed cause they were too busy chasing Geo to bother to spend money keeping their security up to spec against hacker attacks.

 

[Ferrious]

Spoiler: Context and point, tl;dr below

Personally I cancelled all my cards the day the leak was announced. With money so tight I could not afford even the risk that I might lose the details of one of the cards. Because of that I had to go out of my way to secure funding for the week/week and a half it took for my new cards to show up and get activated. I was silly to have all my cards on there, but as they were all added at different times as I moved which account I preferred to use for online stuff I had forgotten to remove the old ones (assuming, ofc, that previous history isn't stored in the PSN).

I have a PSN+ subscription, so the 60-days extra is nice. The games are fairly "meh", I'll pick up inFamous, but as it's like 8 quid in the local supermarket I'm hardly impressed. I probably come out of this about 20 pounds up (about 4 pounds a month for the PSN+ days, plus about 12 pounds for inFamous and some other title - I already own Wipeout and LBP). As it took me around an hour of messing around with banks to get my cards cancelled, and another week-or-so of not-so-mild annoyance at not being able to have easy access to my money (not to mention jigging things around so that stuff that was being auto-paid off those cards, or face "non-payment" fees) I'm not entirely sure 20 pounds covers it.

If you did nothing because your card(s) being stolen didn't faze you, fair enough, this is essentially free stuff. If you had to ensure that you couldn't risk losing money, even temporarily, so had to cancel your cards then it's not really good compensation.

I'll see how I feel once my PSN+ is up for renewal and then make my decision about if it was enough to convince me to stay with it.

 

[Matthew Lynch]

I have a message for these idiotic whiners......SHUT THE FRIG UP!

Sony could have done NOTHING...just flipped the switch and said "There you go.....go nuts" and offered us NOTHING. However they chose to reimburse us with a few games in good faith.

As much as I do not like Sony this is a great thing that they are doing for us.

So take your complaints and stuff them.

When personal information of that nature is jepordized, it's much more of a serious issue than "we're sorry, our bad."

There was great potential for financial loss for people who had their credit cards stolen, and it's preposterous to say "you should be grateful" for what amounts to horrendous security issues and your service being down for an extended period of time.

Imagine if McDonalds accidently gave away your credit card information, then said "sorry, here's a free chicken sandwich." You probably wouldn't have the same reaction.

I will not "take my complaints and stuff them." A complacent customer base means that people can continue to provide shitty service.

All that said, i never use my ps3, and don't have credit card information on my psn account. So fuck yes for free games.

Well said, Ross. I don;t own a PS3 but my little step bro owns a PSP...I was worried someone would use his personal details to rip him off. What Digikid doesn't get is that Sony broke the law when the data was stolen. They were legally required to protect it...and personally I think offering several old titles, several of which are definately already owned by PS3 owners...and offering a 30 day sucscription to plus that then locks you out of anything you brought with it...thats just a slap to the face. At least Microsoft actually does proper apologies...

 

[Woodsey]

"If you're not happy with the content Sony's offering as an apology over that PSN security breach, too bad. Sony's not gonna do anything else."

Nor fucking should they.

 

[SomethingUnrelated]

I'm happy with Sony for this initiative. It's a nice gesture to offer free games on top of enhanced security.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

Greedy people out there if they actually complain about free games.

It's nothing to do with being greedy. People are complaining because all the games they are giving out are 3-4 years old and so the majority of PS3 owners already have them. I think Sony chose these games for that very reason, they knew most people would already have them and so they wouldn't have to give out as much free games.

If Sony really cared about their fan base and wanted to give away free goods, they would have gave away fairly new games that most people don't already own.