Unless you’ve been living in a cave, or perhaps a compound just outside Islamabad, chances are you’re aware that Sony’s Online services have been off line since the 20th of April. Just shy of one month later, Sony has begun restoring said services, much to the delight of online PS3 gamers (and Qriocity music listeners).
However, the green-lighting of services does come with a few restrictions. In a statement, Sony indicated that services began the restoration process this past Friday, including SOE’s portfolio of online games, as well as game forums and websites. The reactivation of these services comes with a standard “please change your password now,” requirement. A fair practice, but it looks like Sony might have started out of the gate with a stumble, as Engadget is reporting that eager gamers are experiencing difficulties in resetting their password, as Sony is being inundated with a massive amount of requests in a short amount of time. Sony points to ISPs that are automatically blocking or delaying the incoming email password change requests. Oye vey.
As a special, “Oops, our bad,” “Welcome Back,” package, sony is offering special game content to all registered members. Players will receive 30 days of additional game time plus an additional day for each day that SOE’s services were down (25).
And while rollouts have been confirmed in North America, South America, EMEA, Australia and New Zealand, there’s one market that’s suspiciously missing: Sony’s home country of Japan. The Dow Jones is reporting that Japanese government officials have given the green light a no-go, citing a few outstanding issues that Sony has failed to comply with. First and foremost, Sony has promised counter-hacking measures (announced on May 1), and second is further security surrounding the protection of users’ credit car number and other private data. Regarding the anti-hacking measures, details have yet to surface as to what has and what has not been implemented, for obvious reasons, but it would appear that Japanese officials aren’t quite satisfied. On the credit card and personal data front, Dow Jones indicates that Sony is already lobbying in talks with Japanese officials to assure compliance.
“Our main priority is the safety and security of our customers’ personal information,” said Kazuo Hirai, Executive Deputy President, Sony Corporation in a statement. “We are making consumer data protection a full-time, company-wide commitment, and have applied enhanced security technologies so that our customers can feel protected and confident about playing our games.”
“Rod is a great new leader for Linden Lab,” said Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life. “Second Life has become a consistently large and profitable business with a thriving virtual economy built together with its passionate Resident community. This has always been a big, long-term vision, it is still early and there is enormous opportunity for growth. With Rod’s fresh insights and deep experience in creating and leading the development of fun, intuitive, immersive entertainment experiences that have attracted massive audiences of loyal users, he’s the right leader to understand what makes us special and bring the next level of growth to Second Life.”
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It looks like Sony has finally adopted an idea I through out there a long time ago – parallel servers. Meaning, the EverQuest II Extended title will operate alongside the EverQuest II subscription model, thereby giving players the choice if they want to pay for a subscription, or pay piece by piece, i.e. free-to-play and microtransactions.
The popular turn based strategy game PoxNora is now available on Facebook. Obviously capitalizing on their own gaming expertise, not only is Sony jumping into the Facebook gaming world with PoxNora, but they also planning on bringing a number of additional games to Facebook based on existing franchises and new intellectual property.
