Sony Responds to Criticisms of PlayStation Network's 'Welcome Back' Lineup

At some point, Sony internally needs to take a stance that people screw off, sell their PS3 and entire game collection and switch to the Wii or 360 is they really feel so hurt.  They've apologized a bunch of times, they've fixed the issue, they'll likely have to pay tons of money in insurance because of this, they're giving away free services and they're giving away free retail games to people.

I'll be picking up Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty which is the European offer. I own the rest of the games already, but I'll probably pick inFamous as the second game so I have a digital copy too.

For my PSP Go it will be Killzone and Modnation. The other games I received just by purchasing the PSP Go.

Aren't those games old as balls with sequels already out/coming out?

They offered what they could. They weren't going to make everyone happy anyway. I don't even have a PSP, but I'll be happy with my inFamous and Little Big Planet.

People are complaining about this offer? I have most of these and I still think it's great.

The choices are much better then what I was expecting, I assumed they would give out copies of flow or flower. I can however see the other side of the argument, that the people most effected by the outage would already have these games, A voucher for a free game in a certain price range would have been a better idea.

Screw it. They knew this would happen. Who has a PS3 and doesn't already own LBP and inFamous? Why not offer the upcoming Uncharted 3? Or the more recent Dragon Age 2? They completely knew this would result in less costs for them, and once again they come across as cheap bastards!

The people that say we should have just been credited $20 to our wallet miss the fact that Sony can't legally do that across all territories (since PSN uses a cash value system and not make believe points)

Screw it. They knew this would happen. Who has a PS3 and doesn't already own LBP and inFamous? Why not offer the upcoming Uncharted 3? Or the more recent Dragon Age 2? They completely knew this would result in less costs for them, and once again they come across as cheap bastards!

People are complaining about this offer? I have most of these and I still think it's great.

omg wipeout.....i think im gonna just get one

I'm of the opinion that if you actually own every one of the games they're offering, your disposable income is large enough that getting free shit shouldn't be an issue.

Ha ! ps store . Can't remember the last time I checked in . Even if they offer the most epic SP game I know I won't download it . I bought ps3 mainly for the MP . 

@Doobie_Wop said:

The gamer entitlement mindset is disgusting and I'm losing respect for the social aspect of this hobby every single day

Here it is:

- Sony can't offer Third Party titles because then they would have to compensate that publisher for every title given away, if 40 million people download Outlander, then Sony have to compensate for that 40 million. It'd also take much longer to set up, get contracts signed and make sure everything's running and I'm sure they wanted the 'Welcome Back' package done as fast as possible.

- Sony can't give you credit, if they did then people could take advantage of the system and use their multiple accounts to multiply their rewards, that costs Sony money. It'd also involve Sony specifically noting what game a user is buying and then paying that publisher, if there are 15 publishers to pay, then that's just a headache and it'd end up taking way too much time. It brings up a whole bunch of cross transaction and communications issues and it'd cost them a large sum of money.

- Sony can't give you a wider selection of First Party games, for every game they add, they'd have to figure out any licensing issues, any regional issues, file sizes (not everyone has the bandwidth to download a 15 gig file, Infamous is the largest at 6.9), censorship ratings and probably many other things. A perfect example would be Germany not being able to get Infamous and that's because of their rating system. Sony don't have the time or the resources to waste, especially if they want this package out the door and ready for the store launch.

Two free retail PS3 games, two free retail PSP games, one month of PS+ (two for members), 100+ pieces of free content in Home, a weekend of free selected movie rentals and a years worth of free Identity Theft monitoring. They are giving everyone all this free stuff and people are still bitching, it's the most content filled compensation package in the history of gaming and all that happened was that their free service was down for three weeks and your Facebook info got out.

On top of all that, the games they are giving out are bloody Game of the Year Winners and contenders. If you have them, then fine, too bad for you, but Infamous only sold 2 million units, LBP sold like 4.5 and I'm sure the others are less than that, which means that the other 40 million people that use the service and don't have those games are going to be ecstatic. 

Sony work within boundaries, they can't do whatever they want, not even give out free stuff, so people need to sit back and maybe come to the realisation that the world outside of their computer screen has different guidelines to follow. 

I'm willing to bet that even if Sony came out and said that everything on the store was free for a week, people will still come in complaining that a week isn't long enough to download all the stuff they want.

Peace.

Note: I swear if any podcasts rag on Sony for this, I'm going to be pissed, they all thought one free PSN game would be enough, but I'm willing to bet they'll find some sort of issue with the package, even if it did exceed everyone's original expectations. This isn't about Sony, this is about gamers weird entitlement issues, happens with nearly every PC game that gets released, new directions franchises are taking, DLC and just about everything else filling up the Neogaf forums.

Could I quote this to get it on more pages, since it is an excellent comment? And can I also invite you to places like Eventhubs where you can make sense of more things? Thank you. Can we give Sony a break? They've done their hardest to fix an admittedly stupid and probably inevitable mistake, and whilst we sit on the boulder they're carrying on our chairs we throw rocks at them, complaining how the chairs aren't comfortable enough.

I'm forced into a corner really as I own 3 of the 5 titles on offer. I would've preferred some kind of voucher to spend as I see fit on the PSN store. But then I can see the difficulty of offering other people's games for free or at a discount. They all had to be home-grown Sony titles. Who knows, I may actually enjoy a Rachet and Clank game....maybe... 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't XBox Live go down for a few hours a few years ago and we got a free XBLA game for it? I think for like 3 or 4 weeks of outage and compromised information Sony should probably step it up....

Wow come on people seriously? The fact that they are repaying you at all is crazy!

Isn't PSN free anyway?

(For those that do pay for PSN + or whatever I think you should just get compensation for days missed , anything more sounds selfish.)

These are great games too.

If you own them already then you should have been playing them while PSN was down.

Ever heard of one-player?

Any complaints over FREE stuff doesn't even matter.

At least Caplin responded to the person. Most people would have just deleted the message and moved on. I always liked the way Caplin did stuff.

Some of you commenting are the biggest fucking jerk-offs I've ever seen in my life and it's society's misfortune that you ever stumbled your caveman frame over to a keyboard.

Fuck your mother, I'm out.

"They have a high Metacritic rating, so whatever."

They could've made Infamous 2 free. 

Kind of looks like there offering off all there old games.  I guess some fans were expecting Kill Zone 3 or something new.

Daveyo520:  No, people are not "so ungrateful"... Sony is again creating another PR nightmare (something they happen to be very good at).  And no, I am not a Nintendo or Xbox fanboy.  I happen to really like the PS3 (except for the fact that my first one got YLOD and now I can't play PS2 games on it).  I own all 3 consoles and to be honest I prefer my PS3 over the others which is why I happen to be pretty peeved that Sony is only offering games that I already own. 

I thought overall it was a pretty good deal  getting at least $30 of free stuff for a month without PSN that I didn't pay for to begin with.  But I do own a 360 as well so it didn't affect me too badly.