Sony "Where's the PR?"

As many users may already aware, the Playstation 3 has run into a little error that effected it’s users in a big way. On March 1st, the internal clock on all “fat” PS3’s was a little mixed up and thought we were currently in a leap year. The cell or some higher function inside the PS3 new better and every “fat” in the wild began to beat itself up over the date, causing numerous problems. The biggest of which was the blahblahblah error, keeping the PS3 from being able to connect to the Playstation Network. This created a domino effect across other games, which required trophies to sync in order to run. Users who turned on their PS3’s and were greeted by this error, were equally as stunned to discover that they were also being treated to a slew of corrupted trophy data, save files and other oddities.

First off, Sony is not a villain in this situation, as this was a silly error that probably happened due to the forgetfulness of some poor employee. When compared to the Xbox 360 and its numerous hardware failures, Sony looks like the gold star of the classroom. The problem was how they handled the situation and the advice they offered their consumers. Telling your customers not to turn on their PS3’s is ridiculous, especially since they would not be online looking for a solution if they had not already done so. Also, most of the posts I saw in North America were directed at the United States audience, but this is a worldwide issue. It was not localized to one region and customers from many countries were probably left in the dark about what was going on. Holding their breath and hoping that this was not the end of their backwards compatible “fat’s” lifespan (I was one of them). I am sure Canadians everywhere were wondering where the support was. While engineers were being called in on a Sunday and someone soon realized that this issue would be resolved once March 2nd rolled around and the internal clock realized its mistake. Instead, of pretending like people were willing to stand by and act like nothing was wrong (which they weren’t reference solution), Sony should have been transparent about the situation and addressed the public with this knowledge, putting everyone’s mind at ease for the next 24 hours. If they were wrong, it at least doused the fire long enough for them to figure out a way to fix it, but if they were right, it potential ended a flame war hours earlier than what actually happened. Taking some action and keeping users from modifying their PS3s and causing more damage. I still love Sony and still support the brand, but I just felt they should have been more responsive to customer concerns, besides some press releases and twitter updates. Though, maybe I am still young and naïve. Whatever the case, everything is find now and my PS3 came back unscathed. Now I can finish Heavy Rain!