Sony Surprised with PSN Activity After Hacking Outage

Sony got its PlayStation Network back online earlier this year after a major hacker attack and, since then, it seems that activity on the service has reached massive records, surprising even the most optimistic of expectations, according to the company.

Sony went through a very difficult time back in April, when a hacker attack saw the personal information of the 77+ million PSN users from around the world be jeopardized. The company took down the service in order to assess the damage and rebuild it in a more secure manner.

The PlayStation Network was back online at the end of May, and Sony tried to win back the trust of its customers with various free games and special offers.

According to the new boss of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Jim Ryan, the response from fans surprised the company because it was much larger than it anticipated.

While talking with MCV about the PSN hacking scandal, Ryan reveled that, "What has surprised us is the willingness of the consumers to re-engage when it came back up. The level of activity on PlayStation Network since then has exceeded our expectations."

Sony confirmed earlier this year that PSN activity after the offline period was quite high, especially in services like the PlayStation Home social network, which is now scheduled to receive a massive update and be turned into more of a social games platform.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer also claimed late last month that the PSN is now more secure and better than ever, while the number of customers has increased by over three million since the hacking scandal.

Seeing as how the PlayStation 3 is now even cheaper, at $250 for the 160GB model, no doubt more and more gamers will join the ranks of PSN users this winter holiday season.