Gamers are slow to forgive. Many own a PlayStation 3 today because they were angry at Microsoft for letting them down when the Xbox 360 suffered from a huge number of breakdowns, due to a manufacturing flaw that led to overheating.
Microsoft’s consumer-unfriendly handling of the Xbox 360’s defects helped Sony recover from a poor launch of the PS 3, which went on sale for far too much money at $599 compared with the $399 Xbox 360 and the $250 Nintendo Wii. Microsoft had to work long and hard to get back its momentum in the market.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Sony’s expected two-week outage for the PlayStation Network could potentially derail the PS 3’s future. So far, Sony has shared precious little information, except that hackers brought down the network and may have stolen the identities and credit card numbers for the PlayStation Network’s 77 million registered users.
Sony executives — game and network services head Kaz Hirai and chief executive Howard Stringer himself — should hold a press conference where they publicly apologize for potentially exposing their users to identity theft by failing to protect their credit card numbers and other personal information. They should do it now, not wait until their investigation is complete or wait until they bring the service back online. Every day of silence is a day when consumers will stew and grow angrier. When the head of the company apologizes, then gamers will feel like their problems are being taken seriously.
If there’s any debate inside Sony about what it should do now, it should end. Cost should not be a worry. Trust is the big problem. Sony has to win trust back and do it fast. It has to be generous as it offers to compensate users for their losses. It has to make up for their lost time and entire users to come back, since they are likely considering the competition, if our poll results from yesterday are to be believed. It has to beef up its security and reassure consumers that their data will be safe.
Whatever it does, it shouldn’t argue with consumers about what they are entitled to have. Microsoft made that mistake, saying to users that they didn’t need replacement machines. Intel made that mistake back in 1994, telling consumers that they didn’t need to replace its Pentium microprocessor, which had a rare mathematical flaw. In each case, it was silly to enrage consumers further.
The apology should be the first thing out of Sony executives’ mouths and the last thing. Amazon just made a mistake by trying to explain what went wrong with its web services business, which crashed and brought down many consumer web sites with it. The Seattle company talked about what brought down its Elastic Cloud Computing service last week, but it took 5,700 words before it finally apologized to consumers. Note to Sony: apologize early and often.
Sony should also consider giving out credits for various kinds of digital goods to the consumers who come back to it after the service comes back online. That could take the form of a simple trophy that says, “I survived the PSN hack attack.” Such little digital trinkets could cost nothing to distribute, but they could show that the company has a sense of humor and a sense of honor about how customers should be treated.
