14 DAY TRIAL // The recent PlayStation Network outage experienced by Sony won't seriously affect the sales of the Japanese company, at least according to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter.
The PlayStation Network has been offline for over a week now, with Sony admitting that it was forced to take the service down because of hacker attacks that might have compromised the security of personal data and even credit card information of its 70+ million PSN users.
While this is seriously a bad time to be Sony right now, this whole scandal won't manifest in decreased sales, at least according to Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who says that the two weeks of the online service outage won't sway potential buyers to the Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii, instead of a PlayStation 3.
"Of course, this is bad for Sony's image, and they have to fix the breach and ensure that it doesn't happen again, or they will risk losing customers forever," Pachter told IndustryGamers.
"I don't think people switch sides in large numbers based on this, considering that few will really have lost very much at all (two weeks of Call of Duty multiplayer is probably the biggest loss), and to 'switch sides' means buying a 360 and paying $60/year for XBL. I think that Sony is in good shape as long as there is not another incident. If there's another breach, it would be pretty bad."
He concluded by saying that the late adopters who are now interested in buying consoles won't actually care about the downtime experienced by the PlayStation Network.
Even with this prediction, Sony is taking heat from a lot of directions, with a U.S. senator, as well as UK government group asking the company how it was possible for hackers to get a hold of personal user data and why it took so long to let users know about the leak of information.
An American PSN user has already filed a lawsuit against Sony, citing largely the same things, and demands not only monetary compensation but also credit card monitoring from Sony.
We'll know for sure how the PSN outage affected the sales of the PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable next month, when the April sales figures are released.