Sony PSN Reveal Amazing Revenue Rise
The phrase ‘any publicity is good publicity’ could not be more appropriate for Sony at the moment (even if they do not want to describe it as such), as they revealed that the hacking scandal which affected them in April has actually boosted their sales figures, following on from their CEO Sir Howard Stringer’s claim that the company are stronger because of the hacking.
Sony have confirmed that revenue figures for the PlayStation Network connected gaming store are up by 14% following the headline-making service outage, while over 3 million new PSN members have also been recorded since the service resumed, though part of this rise in popularity may be down to the lucrative PlayStation Store ’welcome back’ packages (with free games and movies amongst the options available to customers) offered to affected users following the problems.
As a business side-effect, Sony seem to have also been boosted in other areas of their media empire, with 800,000 new customers for their ’Music Unlimited’ service and a 5% revenue increase on their Video Unlimited pay-per-view movie company.
Sony’s global business development director So Saida said that the news surrounding the PSN this year might have: ”…woken up [Sony's] dormant customers back to life. The outage has actually made us more available to those customers and reminded them of all the services available. But it’s got nothing to do with PR.”
Saida explained how Sony have recovered from the PSN service outage (with a reported new dedicated security centre in a new location) and won back public support: “The media questions [whether Sony will recover from the PSN hack], but we have added three million new accounts. Sony has been honest with this. All technology companies get attacked, but it’s about whether you are honest with customers, how soon you pick it up and deal with it. It’s also about educating the customers, making sure they protect their accounts. We all need to be careful of security issues, but hopefully those figures will show where we are after the outage.”
So Saida was speaking at the launch of Sony Entertainment Network, a new brand which is thought to be bringing all PlayStation, Music Unlimited, and Video Unlimited services under one larger category within the corporation, though a re-branding might not be necessary with the quick turnaround that Sony have produced. Could this be a sign that web hackers are not that effective after all, or was it just a lucky series of excellent business techniques by Sony?
Related News:
- Sony Claim PSN Has Improved After Hacking
- Sony Announce Gradual PSN Return
- Sony Announce Catchup TV And Movie Service For The PS3
- Sony Create 3D On Demand Update
- Netflix Losing Sony Movies Is Just Temporary
[...] a regular system update planned for Wednesday 7 February, the online gaming service known as PlayStation Network (PSN) will now be referred to as ‘Sony Entertainment Network’ (SEN), a process that [...]