Sony I hope you're listening

Last week on June 14^th 2011, Sony began restoring online service in Hong Kong, the last two regions to be brought back online since the outage began on April 21, nearly two months ago. With the little bit of distance we have from the initial incident, I think it’s a good time to look back at what happened, and especially how Sony handled the crisis. To save you any pointless suspense, I think Sony did a pretty terrible job handling the crisis, and needs to rethink its PR strategy.

First a timeline of notable events:

April 20: PSN goes down worldwide. Sony announces that “certain functions” are down on their US blog, but no details are given.

April 21: Another post, claiming it will take 1-2 days to get services back up.

April 22: PSN blog confirms some sort of external intrusion took place

April 23: Announces further delays in bringing services back online

April 25: Acknowledgement that they know people want information, but still has none to share

April 26: Officially acknowledges personal user information was compromised, possibly including credit card information. A second post was made to explain the delay in informing people their information was compromised

April 27: Q&A posted detailing the nature of the attack, what is being done about it, and how people can protect themselves from identity theft

April 30: Sony announces phased restoration to begin this week

May 5: Final internal system testing begun

May 5: Announces offer for free AllClear ID Plus Identity Theft Protection in the US

May 5: Posts letter from Howard Stringer

May 14: Kazuo posts video announcing PSN restoration begins today for US and EU

May 27: Phased restoration of services in Asia begins

May 31: Complete restoration of services in Asia begins except in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan

June 9: Full restoration of services begins in Japan

June 14: Full restoration of services in Hong Kong begins

Now let’s start with what Sony did right. The list is short, but in fact they did do a few things pretty well.

1.       When Sony did reveal that personal information had been compromised, they did a good job explaining the measures taken to protect users’ security and why they had to shut down PSN so abruptly. Personally I am glad they didn’t try to keep the system up while figuring out what happened, despite the huge inconvenience. The official response can be found here. What’s especially good about the response is that it lists all the ways users can check their financial records for possible identity theft, and how to use them.

2.       To make amends, Sony offered a fair compensation package, especially considering that PSN is free to use. PSN users with accounts created before the attack occurred received a 30-day subscription to PSN Plus, two free PS3 games and two free PSP games, as well as a free one year subscription to AllClear ID. It’s not the full subscription service to AllClear, but it’s a bit more than the free service AllClear offers. For PlayStation Home users, they also gave each user 100 free items. What was nice about this is that Sony didn’t care if you have multiple accounts, so if you had two or more PSN accounts you could pretty easily get all the games they were giving away. Also, though it should be standard practice, they don’t set PSN Plus to auto-renew when the month is up, and don’t even require you to have a credit card attached to your account to use it. Any content you buy at the reduced PSN Plus price you can continue to use after the subscription ends (free PSN Plus games require an active subscription to use, however)

And that’s about it. Now what went wrong?

1.       Most importantly, Sony waited nearly a week to reveal that user data was compromised. This is an unforgivable mistake. No matter what Sony knew at the time it turned PSN off, it should have advised users that personal data may have been compromised. Better to err on the side of caution and later discover that no data was stolen than vice-versa. In hindsight it seems that most users are safe, but there is just no way to know that in advance.

2.       While I have no inside information, it seems Sony had no communications strategy in place for handling crisis situations. The messaging Sony delivered clearly indicated an out-of-date hierarchical approach in which a single message came down from the top and everyone on the ground had to stick to that message, no matter how little it resonated with readers.

a.       Comparing the hack-related blog posts added to Sony’s PSN blogs on the US, UK and EU sites, they are identical, yet oddly are written in the first person. This is a beginner’s mistake, and only reinforces Sony’s image as a monolithic robotic beast.

b.      During the crisis period, PlayStation’s Facebook page only linked back to the US blog posts, adding the same monolithic robotic branding effect.

c.       On Twitter, all of the Sony accounts I could find also only linked to the blog posts and provided no personal feedback to PSN users other than vague “we’re working on it” statements.

d.      When Howard Stringer did finally get around to posting a written letter addressing the situation, it two weeks late, which is about one week and six days later than it should have been. Furthermore, it was a terrible response, completely tone deaf to the audience expectations and attempts, but fails, to justify why Sony waited so long to inform users their information was at risk. You can read it here, but to give one example of how tone deaf it is, Singer writes:

“In the last few months, Sony has faced a terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But now we are facing a very man-made event – a criminal attack on us — and on you — and we are working with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world to apprehend those responsible.”

Comparing the hack to a terrible natural disaster that struck Japan? Really Sony?

e.      Asia—Americans and Europeans might not notice, but as bad as Sony’s PR strategy is in Western countries, it is much worse in Asia. First of all, there are no Asian blogs, twitter feeds or Facebook pages, so most of Asia is in what is close to total communications blackout with Sony, and have no way to interact with the brand online. Second, the games offered to Asian PSN users were generally much less popular ones. That it took much longer to bring Asia’s PSN back online was likely not Sony’s fault, but certainly they could have been more forthcoming with information about why it took so long.

That about sums up my analysis of Sony’s poor PR response to the crisis, but I would like to comment more broadly on their very poor approach to PR in general. As others have stated, while Sony is excellent at advertising, it really doesn’t understand how to do PR.

As I mentioned up there, Sony is all about developing one centralized message and only allowing that message to be shared. What’s worse is that they try to hide this by putting real people at the frontline of their communications, people like Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communications and social media. Despite all the blog posts that appear in his name, they are exactly the same ones that appear on the EU and UK sites, under the names of whomever “writes” those blog posts. It’s kind of like reading some Kafka novel crossed with a bit of Camus, but with much less edifying results. I don’t fault Patrick either, because it’s clearly not his idea—someone higher up is making these decisions, and it’s unfortunate.

That said, Patrick et al should be doing a lot more to become a presence for Sony in social media. They should be making their Twitter accounts more visible, trying to attract followers, and becoming voices of influence that their followers can trust. I hate to compare to Microsoft, but Microsoft has done this very well with @majornelson, and there’s no market or industry reason why Sony should not do the same. @TheKevinButler is fun and great for promoting stuff, but you can’t use him to deal with real communications problems.

Sony’s @AskPlayStation Twitter account is one of its worst PR offenders. It’s TERRIBLE. The worse customer service account I can imagine, and one wouldn’t even need to use it to see why. Go ahead, open the page, and what do you see? “Response hours 2-5pm, Mon-Fri”. Again Sony, really? Three hours a day, and none at all on weekends? For kicks I checked out what Xbox offers in this department and found their Twitter help feed is open “Mon-Fri 6am – 12am PST, Sat-Sun 10am – 6pm PST”, they list the names of the people who respond to you, and they have tweeted over 584,000 times compared to Sony’s less than 900 times.

Oh and forget actually getting any response from @AskPlayStation, either. I tweeted them three times over three days asking them why I couldn’t connect to PSN after the US servers were back up before getting a response, which was “Sorry for the delay. We would need more information in order to help. What happens when you try to log in?” So I responded, and responded again, and again, and they just never got back to me at all. Looking through the tweets that @AskPlayStation has posted, you quickly see that it serves no purpose whatsoever other than to, you guessed it, redirect you to Sony’s official statements on stuff.

By the way I just checked how long it took @XboxSupport to respond to complaints: 1 minute. Sony, are you paying attention??

The last big failure I’ll mention today actually holds some pretty great potential for Sony. Last year Sony launched the poorly named PlayStation.Blog.Share (yet the URL is share.blog.us.playstation.com. Confused?), where PSN users can submit ideas Digg or Reddit style for improving PSN that other users can then vote on. The top ideas show up on the front page. It’s a brilliant idea, a great way to see what PSN users want. So what’s wrong? Sony hasn’t implemented any of the top ideas, nor has it even acknowledged them to say ‘hey this is great but we can’t do it because of xxx’ or ‘that’s awesome! We’re actually working on something similar, hope you like how it turns out, blah blah blah’. What is the point of asking your users for their input if you aren’t going to do anything with it?

Sony you have a great product and lots of excellent games. I personally find your game selection more interesting than what Microsoft offers, especially with offbeat games like Heavy Rain, Flower and the Team ICO games, but the big blockbusters like Uncharted are better than anything Microsoft has to offer as well. I really just think you need to do more to connect with your fans, especially in the US and Asia—both markets where you have a lot of potential for different reasons. So I suggest adding one word to your slogan: Play. Create. Share. Listen.

Posted via email from 电玩杀瓜 - a game blog

Playing with inFamous (I wish I was)

Lucky me sitting in an Asian timezone was able to enter pretty quick and quickly enough Game Hunter's contest for inFamous demo codes. With only 20 available on a first-come, first-serve basis, I, in my mid afternoon daze that always sets in after eating too much Chinese food, lumbered into action to register with USA Today and got myself a code! I know it was just a marketing ploy to increase viewership, and I probably would have cancelled my account the moment I found out I was too late, but I won and as a result happy enough to go on living.

Infamous, sorry inFamous (for some reason), is a 3rd person action game. I hesitate to call it a shooter, because you're not exactly shooting. I guess you shoot bolts of electricity and throw electricity bombs, so it's sort of shooting. But this is not a TPS by any stretch of the imagination.

Actually the attacks, which look beautiful and are made better by a largely destructible environment, are pretty conventional. You shoot stuff, it dies. It dies in cool ways, but it still dies, or is at least disabled. Disabled enemies or bystanders can be sucked dry of their life force, healed, or restrained with arc binders, which I don't understand really because they must shock the hell out of you.

The electrical powers are fun, but what really puts this game in a room of one's own is the controls. The controls, the controls! They work so, so amazingly well.

I feel like all the promos were telling me about this game was how you could manipulate the environment with your Force-like electrical powers or be Famous or inFamous, but failed to mention that you're actually a Parkour superstar as well. You run, jump, roll, sure, but did you know you can grab on to just about anything that appears grab-onable? Railings, building ledges, window sills, the sides of a train. You can crawl up lampposts and girders, or launch yourself up the wrong side of an emergency fire escape. Rail slide stair railings, even building-to-building electrical cables and electrified train rails. All the while setting limits--no scaling smooth walls. (I noticed one bug in the game though--I was unable to climb over a chain-link fence! How ironic! Maybe it's a kind of subtle commentary on the emptiness of the protagonist's soul).

The best thing about all this is how simple it is. You don't have to do special button presses, you character just does what is appropriate in the given situation. If you jump on the electrified wire, he'll slide--if you jump to it but let's say you miss judge and fall short, he can grab it as well. And to get on such narrow objects is not the painfully bone-crushing task it could be at times in Mirror's Edge, but rather your protagonist (I really should look up his name) is smart enough to jump exactly where you were intending for him to go, so if you were to have missed by a couple inches, you'll actually be fine.

Did I mention that the game also manages to include a cover system that works as well as GOW2 if not better? I guess because the button layout is kept sparse (a big plus for a button retard such as myself), they had the space for it.

So as great as blowing up vehicles, launching people a hundred feet, watching wooden objects shred to pieces (a pretty amazing touch) and sucking the life out of innocent bystanders is, I had just as much fun exploring the city in all directions. Sadly the demo forces you to take the next mission if you delay too long, but it has done its work--I want more.

p.s. There is one thing I wish (hopelessly I assume, since the game has already gone gold) that they would change--the sound your character makes when he runs. I'm not sure how to describe it other than utter crap. It doesn't even sound like a CD-quality sound, rather just some garbled computer pc speaker tonal grunts. It's a bit disturbing and actually takes you out of the game a bit. A normal swishing sound of jeans would probably suffice. 

(thanks Game Hunters!)

Sony headed for more trouble?

There's a Chinese report out that Sony might be headed for trouble keeping costs down as sales fall... that's just bad, bad news. If it's true. Although Chinese media does tend to be better at reporting on business stuff than anything else.

Original article can be found here:

http://homea.people.com.cn/GB/8807545.html

China to require real name gamer registration

FTA:

The government will start real-name registration for online game players this year, said Zhang Yijun, director of the General Administration of Press and Publication's technology and digital publication department.

Four online game companies' operations have been suspended after it was found that their software did not have the mandatory anti-addiction system, he said in Qingdao on Wednesday.

To be sure this affects only PC games, as the console market doesn't officially exist in China, but this is clearly one of the challenges companies like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will face in introducing their systems to China.

Would they have to design a completely new online service just for China, that forces users to present proof of identity and is monitored for sensitive content? Would doing so be worth the economic benefits? I imagine Microsoft and Nintendo could make the argument that it would be, but I doubt Sony can.

UPDATE: According to ars technica, this registration is for MMO players only, but of course that would be a large percentage of online PC gamers in China. Console gamers might not have to worry then, unless Xbox Live and the PSN get classified as MMOs, which I wouldn't be surprised if they did. (ars technica)

Xbox360 outselling PS3--is anyone surprised?

I'm not, but statistics, in my opinion, are usually a load of crap anyway. I mean Al Gore wins the popular vote but loses the election, so apparently 50%+ of people can be wrong.

But I digress. Stats are bs here however you look at because on the one hand, the Xbox360 has sold 8 million more units than the PS3, but on the other, it has been out a year longer. So that negates the success right? Wrong, because the lead a year ago was only 5 million, so it is outselling the PS3. I think. Who knows. 

On the other other other hand, though, I'm surprised that the PS3 has sold 20 million units and yet has been called a total failure in the press lately. I mean, it's been a huge loss to Sony, as they've never made a profit on it, but that's still quite a few units, certainly more than I thought it was.

We have a winner...

China is quickly becoming known for its knock-off video game systems, none more (in)famous than the "Vii", a Nintendo Wii wannabe with far worse graphics and sketchier motion detection. Here's another shot at the prize though, presciently titled the "Winner". It attempts to replicate the PS3's multimedia functions while adding a touch of Wii with a motion detecting controller, and it is priced to move at $120-150. Watch out PS3, you have some serious competition for dead last in the console war!

Chinese piracy for sale, special 2-for-1 deal!

It's not just a Samsung Anycall rip-off, it's a Sony rip-off too! The Amycoll PS3, how could you go wrong with this one?

Will the PS2 ever die?

It seems not. According to this report on kotaku, more people are playing PS2 than any other system, including the Wii, and by a ginormous margin. WTF? People, it's not 2005 anymore, come on and step up to the latest and greatest.

What does this mean? Are next-gen consoles just lame and sucky, like my great great grandmother's teats? Or are people just not seeing what the big hoohaw is about the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3?

None of the above. Perhaps once console makers could rely on the market's steady growth to introduce new and more powerful systems that would outsell their predecessors, but the PS2 kinda futzed that up for everyone by selling enough systems to populate a decent-sized country. Obviously the next-gen consoles had no hope to match the PS2's sales, and I'm sure they weren't aiming for it, but Sony must feel a bit sad that the original Xbox is played more than the PS3 is.

Will another system ever sell as well as the PS2? Not until they all break down I suppose.

I predict, however, that the next-next-gen systems, perhaps the PS4 and Xbox^3, will do much better. The PS3 and 360 were stop-gaps, leaps ahead in performance but not really offering anything new in terms of gameplay. The PS3 did offer more innovation, but its high cost stifled it. Personally I think it's a great investment if you're not only looking for a gaming machine, but Sony is only starting to market it as such now. Next time around, boys...