Sony has given a revised forecast for their fiscal year today, adding a large loss resulting from the earthquake and tsunami tragedy in Japan and the security breach of the PlayStation Network.
The company says the PSN breach will cost Sony $171.1 million and the earthquake will cost them a devastating $1.8 billion.
PSN costs were mainly attributed to the cost of the free 1-year of ID theft protection the company is offering all affected, as well as the free games/PlayStation Plus and customer support costs.
Adds Sony (via Gamasutra):
So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change.
In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 at this moment.
Overall, thanks to the earthquake and the PSN issues, Sony says its fiscal year, ended in March 2011, will be revised down to a $3.2 billion loss from an $858.5 million profit.
Sony did say, however, that the earthquake will not affect the release of the NGP (PSP 2) and that the PlayStation Store would be available again this week.
Result for: free game
Sony has confirmed today that it will be offering ten free games to new PSPGo owners who register their systems online.
The games included in the deal are not some cheap ports either. Sony says the games included in the deal are: Gran Turismo, LittleBigPlanet, MotorStorm Arctic Edge, Wipeout Pure, Pursuit Force: Extreme Justice, FIFA 2010 World Cup, Need for Speed Shift, Gran Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and Assassin’s Creed: Bloodlines.
In the past, Sony has offered free games to early PSPGo adopters, and free games to users who upgraded from older PSP handhelds.
While Sony has yet to reveal hardware sales for the Go, the general consensus is that sales have been a complete flop, especially in the EU and UK.
When the system launched, Don McCabe, managing director of the UK game chain Chips said he expected the console to “fail miserably” in the market.
Result for: free game
According to new data from Mobclix, there are now over 6000 games available in the Apple App Store, giving iPhone and iPod Touch owners a large variety of free and paid downloads.
There are now 6276 games, with 1516 offered as free downloads. Puzzle games are the most popular genre, while racing games are the least popular. Puzzle games account for 18 percent of all the games available.
The most popular free game by far is Tapulous’ Tap Tap Revenge 2, which is somewhat of a Guitar Hero clone that allows users to tap out songs. The most popular paid game is the excellent Pocket God by Bolt Creative which allows you to play “God” of six pygmies on an island.
The second largest category of apps is “Entertainment” followed closely by “Books” and “Utilities.”
