14 DAY TRIAL // After more than three weeks of depriving its customers of the PlayStation Network online service, Sony is beginning to feel the negative impact, as retailers are reporting 200 percent increase in trade-ins for PlayStation 3 consoles as well as games made for the device.
The PlayStation Network has been offline for over three weeks, and, seeing as how the company itself doesn't know when it might be back up, you can imagine that owners of PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable consoles are getting a bit angry.
But, while some may just wait it out, it seems that quite a lot of people are deciding to trade in their PlayStation 3 and its games for cash or an Xbox 360, the main rival of the Sony console.
According to UK magazine Edge, which talked with certain retailers, while trade-in numbers were fine after one week of PSN outage, things quickly escalated after the second one, as people couldn't handle the lack of online service.
"In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades," said one store manager at a major UK retailer. "However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 percent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead."
Retailers say that the majority of people who traded in their PlayStation 3 for an Xbox 360 were "the hardcore online shooter crowd."
This is backed up by Belgian games retailer Gameswap, who revealed that while trade-ins of consoles were pretty normal last month, after the PlayStation Network down time, almost every customer bringing in a PlayStation 3 demands an Xbox 360 as well as copies of shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
"We're just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 percent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We've only sold 30 to 40 percent of our inventory right now."
If Sony doesn't get the PlayStation Network back online next week, then it's going to lose quite a lot of other customers who will either abandon the PS3 or jump ship to the Xbox 360.