With all the things being talked about Sony and how they have failed the user community, you would think that sales would take a hit for them. Apparently not as they are reporting a 13% increase for the month of April. There were 20 days in the month before the voluntary shutdown and you might believe that sales would have slowed through the end of April, but that is not the case. They increased for Sony and has been reported by Patrick Seybold, who has been the spokesperson for all the blog posts about the status of the network.
That is good news for Sony and they have a 40% increase from the same period last year. It does appear that they have a strong following in spite of all the negative publicity surrounding the Sony PlayStation. The games that operate on the PS3 are ones that many desire and that is why they own the PS3. In some other reports, individual game sales have slowed in the beginning of May and can be attributed to the voluntary shutdown of the network by Sony. With rumors of testing going on by developers on the newly rebuilt network, Sony needs to come out with a planned date for returning the online gaming, which would turn into added sales for the consoles and games.
These numbers tend to indicate that defections to other gaming platforms has not happened yet, but Sony needs to return confidence to the user community quickly so that it does not become a problem. In another story, returns of the PS3 in the UK have increased from what are considered normal. They are reporting an increase of 200% starting in the second week of the PlayStation Network being down. While the increase is significant, there are no reports after the second week and we are now into the fourth week. While they may be increasing, it is limited to the UK for now.
We did some checking on the story and did find that it is specific to the UK, though some others are reporting it as though it is happening in many other countries. The article, along with BetaNews did checking in the US and did not find any reports of significant increases in trade ins for the PS3.
Given that the current activities in testing for the return of the PlayStation Network are underway, it is still going to be some time before everything returns back to normal. They will be restarting things by region, which has Japan returning first with the rest of the world getting the online gaming back slowly after that. With the blackout for the month of May, hopefully Sony does not see a huge increase in PS3 trade ins or a large drop in sales.
