About a week after the Christmas Day hack that had crippled Sony’s PlayStation Network, the company reached out to the gaming community this week, offering extended PlayStation Plus memberships and giving a one-time 10 percent discount for PS Store customers.
According to a blog post from Sony, the new specials are a “thank you” from the company to gamers for hanging tough during the past few days, as PSN was rendered offline by a cyber-attack. Players get five extra days on their PS Plus subscription, and would also get to save 10 percent off as a one-time-only discount when purchasing items on the PlayStation Store. The latter deal is exclusive for PSN members, and will become available later on in the month.
In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, gamers offered mixed opinions on Sony’s “thank you” offerings. One man, Robert Taylor, said that Sony doesn’t have any obligation to give discounts, as the hacks weren’t the company’s fault. Instead, “A bunch of kids decided to overload the servers with DDoS just to (ruin) Christmas for a lot of people,” Taylor commented.
Another gamer, Bryan Nguyen, said he wasn’t satisfied with the offers due to the fact that the hack did indeed spoil end up spoiling Christmas. “Five extended days and 10% off of money that we have to spend is not reparations,” he said. “It’s giving us what we deserved outright from the beginning and forcing us to spend more in the faulty tech company in order to reap the 10% benefit.”
Unlike the Sony Pictures hack, which has been traced to a group called Guardians of Peace, the PSN hack was supposedly perpetrated by another established group of cyber-terrorists, the Lizard Squad. As a result of the attack, existing PSN members weren’t able to log in to their accounts, and weren’t able to redeem download codes. New members, on the other hand, had a hard time creating accounts.