PSN Outage Causes 200% Rise in PS3 Trade-Ins

The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.

“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”

Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.

Belgian-based Gameswap spokesman Tom Mestdagh went on record to state, “At the end of each month people come to sell their consoles. People that need money (to pay bills). What’s different this time around is that that they are bringing in PS3s together with all their games and they don’t want money, they want an Xbox 360. In every case it is because of Black Ops and or Modern Warfare 2.

“We’re just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 per cent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We’ve only sold 30 to 40 per cent of our inventory right now.”

Game purchases have also been markedly affected by the PSN outage. Sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops went from 44% for the PS3 in the first two weeks of the game’s release to 24% of sales of Black Ops last week. Similar trends have struck games like FIFA 12.

Another retailer told Edge:

“A lot of people have been phoning asking us about personal details on PSN as they are struggling to get a response from Sony themselves. Overall, people that have traded with us seem annoyed at how Sony has handled all of this, and say they would not trust them with details again in the future.”

However, it’s all about online gaming. “All we’ve seen is an incredible amount of disgruntled people annoyed that they can’t play online,” stated Mestdagh, and gamers have actually “stopped complaining about the fact that Microsoft charges for Xbox Live. It used to be a big problem for most of our PS3 customers.”

You get what you pay for.

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Bethesda’s Hines: Don’t Shoehorn MultiplayerBethesda’s Hines: Don’t Shoehorn Multiplayer

Bethesda Softworks vice president of marketing Pete Hines is critzing publishers and developers who shoehorn multiplayer into their games that doing such a thing is “a waste of time” and advises, “Just drop it, don’t bother…it’ll make for a worse game.”

In an interview with Next Gen BIZ, Hines states that using online multiplayer as a tool to prevent used game trade-ins and rental simply doesn’t work, and robs developers of valuable man-hours.

Hines stated:

“(People ask us) for a game like Skyrim or Prey 2, why doesn’t it have multiplayer? Well, our question is always the opposite when we talk to a developer. If you’re doing multiplayer, why are you doing multiplayer? What are you trying to accomplish?

“If you’re doing it just to check a box or because every other publisher says you’ve got to have multiplayer, then just drop it, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time, a giant distraction and it’ll make for a worse overall game.

“We want the best game possible. If that’s a singleplayer game that’s 15 to 20 hours, then make that! Don’t waste your time on features that don’t make the game better.”

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Prey 2 are two Bethesda properties that will lack multiplayer, but one of the tools to encourage games to keep both games will be downlodable content and, even more important, good communications with the game communities and nurturing the fandom for both games.

Episode 524: Goodbye, 2018!Episode 524: Goodbye, 2018!

This is the last podcast of 2018, and the next episode will be our Games of the Year announcement. Until then, we snark at Pewdiepie, and check some of the news ending the year.

This week’s news includes:

  • Steam Xbox One cross-play tools hinted
  • Americans can get Assassin’s Creed Odyssey free from Google
  • Discord Store to offer developers 90 percent of game revenues
  • Inca announced for Civilization VI: Gathering Storm

Let us know what your Game of the Year is.