As a consumer, I can't be miffed about the four PSN freebies Sony is offering to gamers as an apology for the whole PSN disaster. I already have my eyes on Super Stardust HD and Wipeout HD.
But as a fellow of the gaming industry, I can understand why some developers are nonplussed about having to compete with free games, especially independent developers who either planned on releasing their games during the PSN outage or mere days before it happened… ouch. One such victim is Slam Bolt Scrappers, developed by Fire Hose Games, though they "do not blame Sony for it".
Another independent developer, Housemarque is hardly as kind, as its CEO Ilari Kuittinen attests in a statement to Edge Online:
The issue is that everyone now gets games for free, so people might just play the free games for a while. By the time they are ready to buy something, Outland is maybe old news.
An unnamed source also sympathizes on Eurogamer:
As a developer, I feel very sorry for those teams that did try to release their titles during the PSN outage window. Beyond that, I feel sorry for those that are attempting to launch games in the days following the outage, as there will likely be such a backlog of traffic that it may be hard to be noticed in the flurry of 'get everything back up and running'.
I think it would be a good gesture for Sony to highlight these developers on PSN for several months, or find some way to alleviate their financial zero during the outage. Triple-A studios can easily survive the PSN outage; many indies cannot.
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