14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Sony has said that its much-troubled PlayStation Network service is at the moment performing better than it was before the hacker attacks that forced the company to take it down in late April of this year.
Speaking at the IFA consumer electronics show in Germany, Howard Stringer, who is the chief executive officer of Sony, has stated, “I'm pleased to tell you that the PSN is more secure and better than ever. We are aggressively expanding its content. We have more than 3 million new customers since the network came back online, and sales are exceeding what we had before the cyberattacks.”
He added, “This year, we at Sony have been flooded, we've been flattened, we've been hacked, we've been singed. But the summer of our discontent is behind us. The past is a prologue to future possibility.”
The PSN has only been fully back online since early June.
The CEO did not offer actual sales figures to back up its statements, but Sony has been very aggressive about offering compensation to gamers in order to get them using PSN again and has since then added quite a bit of content to the service.
At the IFA, Sony also announced that it was making PSN part of a new brand called Sony Entertainment Network, which is set to deliver content not only to home consoles and handhelds but also to the Xperia line-up of smartphones and to the set-to-launch-in-September Sony tablets.
The Sony Entertainment Network is also incorporating Qriocity and splits into Music and Video Unlimited and will get new features in the coming months.
The Sony hack attack affected more than 70 million accounts and the yet-undetermined attackers managed to get personal information including sensitive bits like credit card information.
A number of other video game companies have been since affected by hacker attacks.