Sony will finally be sending a high-level executive to testify before the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade on the three week outage of PlayStation Network and Sony’s slowness in informing its customers on the compromising of personal and credit card data.
Ken Johnson, an aide to subcommittee chairwoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), told The Atlantic Magazine that Tim Schaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment, would testify before the subcommittee next week:
“While Chairman Bono Mack remains critical of Sony’s initial handling of the data breaches, she also is appreciative that the company has now agreed to testify. The Chairman firmly believes that the lessons learned from…the Sony…experiences can be instructive and guide us as we develop comprehensive data protection legislation. We expect to introduce that legislation, which will provide new safeguards for American consumers, in the next few weeks.”
Previously, Sony’s Kaz Hirai had only sent his testimony in a letter to the Committee.
From the horses mouth, Home producer Martijn Van der Meulen “
Typically, we have “exclusive” fallout from the console war which forces the hand of the consumer to purchase all consoles to play all the games they love. Many hardcore gamers are into first person shooters like Halo and Gears of War but also like their Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy fixes. In years prior, you’d have to invest in Microsoft and Sony’s solutions to get your fix. Now things are changing.
It makes sense for Sony to try to push themselves away from being classified with the Wii console because it makes them look bad. We’re all equal gamers here, there is no need to break into more sub-categories when only three consoles vying for top spot. Many folks (including us) criticize the slow adoption rate of Wii games, yet they steal top software sales spots as well.