Sony Tries Again, Misses

Sony is still looking for some good news.

Once again Sony has written to developers and managed to tell them not much. I can understand why Sony would not want to make a blanket, public statement to the effect of "developers, we'll cover all your losses." They don't want to create more liability, and possibly have developers inflating what they might have lost. So Sony is probably telling developers, quietly, that they'll make good on the losses in some fashion.

However, Sony loses out by not making a public statement, because developers who might be considering creating PSN titles are certainly not as interested now as they might have been a month ago.

Sony's probably hoping that all the bad press will blow over soon, but while PSN is back up in most place the online store still isn't operating. Which means developers are still not able to sell anything, and they're probably wondering when they will make money from the PS3 again.

At least Sony's got some free games going out to the fans, who will probably not remember the outage too much in a month or two. Developers have longer memories, especially when large sums of money are involved. I still think some public declaration of future loss indemnification would be a good idea for Sony... or perhaps Microsoft will try that.