14 DAY TRIAL // PlayStation Network and Xbox Live services were under DDoS attack for almost a day on Christmas and Sony’s online services are still not fully restored with many players still struggling to log in to PSN.
However, Xbox One owners were luckier as Microsoft managed to restore Xbox Live services only a few hours after the DDoS attacks executed by a group called Lizard Squad have ended.
Still, for at least 12 hours, most of Microsoft’s online services were reachable and that includes Xbox Live and Windows Phone Store. There’s been less talk on the latter, but Windows Phone Store was down for almost all Christmas day and that did not bode well for some game developers.
The situation described by a mobile game developer can be easily applied to any other indie studio that creates games for either Xbox or PlayStation.
Necrosoft Games is a small studio that released a Windows Phone game called Gunhouse, on October 27. The game is available for free (no ads) because developers have gone through a program called Appcampus, which paid most of the development costs, and they felt that this is the best course of action to get a higher number of downloads on Windows Phone Store.
Their hope was to impress Microsoft if their game would reach a certain amount of downloads per day, so that they can get more funding opportunities for other projects.
Gunhouse had ups and downs, as devs learned from their mistakes
As Brandon Sheffield, one of Necrosoft Games founders, says in a post on Gamasutra, their game Gunhouse got featured in a section of the Windows Phone Store and managed to hit the “new and rising” list due to high amount of positive feedback.
Unfortunately, developers were not aware of the procedures and did not go through the proper Appcampus QA process, instead they have done QA themselves. Gunhouse needed to be hidden from the store until devs solved the issue, but by the time the game was back on Windows Phone Store, they lost the trend.
They went from 600 downloads per day to under 10, because they had to hid the game two weeks after the official launch on Windows Phone Store.
The salvation came in the form of a small article that appeared on a well-known blog that writes about Windows Phone and boosted Gunhouse’s downloads unexpectedly.
On December 23 and 24, Gunhouse had 3,000 downloads per day on average. Suddenly, the folks over at Necrosoft Games were back in business. Alas, then came December 25 and Xbox Live, along with other Microsoft online services, including Windows Phone Store, suddenly crashed under DDoS attacks.
Attacks like this have little effect on high-profile developers, but can be disastrous for indie devs
Gunhouse’s upward trend was stopped and the game got quite a few one-star ratings because of the Windows Phone Store crash. That means the game could not have been listed under the “top reviewed” list, even if Gunhouse's review average is still high.
Basically, the game was dead in the water due to the service takedown, and with little chance of a comeback. Because the two days of increased downloads were not enough for the system to register the game on an upward trend, Gunhouse isn't listed in the “new and rising” category either.
Now, the lives of those at Necrosoft Games do not depend on how good their game does on various stores, but many indie developers make a living from their work and Holiday season is a big opportunity for them.
The effects of such an attack on Sony and Microsoft could have been disastrous for many indie developers.
Hopefully, all will be able to recover from it, but the question remains: was it really worth it to attack Sony and Microsoft to point out their security flaws, considering many apps and games developers suffered great losses as a side effect? We sincerely don’t think so.
