PlayStation Network has been down for over three weeks, and some in the industry have warned that this major downtime and security breach could "undermine" the future of digital distribution in the games business. Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, which recently sold its Impulse digital platform to GameStop, isn't too worried about the impact of the PSN disaster, however.
"I don't think this will affect digital distribution one way or the other," Wardell commented to IndustryGamers. "It can be remarkably difficult to keep a dedicated hacker attempt out of any network. This incident may have the long-term benefit of elevating IT security specialists to the positions that they really deserve."
He continued, "The PSN loss of revenue for developers is, however, more problematic. It's one of the reasons why I've always been adamant about there being as many channels as possible for developers to distribute their games on so that the loss of one did not cripple an entire platform."
Sony recently issued a letter to its partners on PSN, but the letter made no mention of how or if the company would be helping out or compensating developers and publishers for lost revenues.
