The developer and publisher behind Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Mega Man is losing large quantities of money from the Playstation Network outage. In addition to Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix not selling, their recent release of Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 cannot be played due to a fail on Capcom’s part by adding “always-connected” DRM.
Now, in all honesty, I don’t believe this is costing Capcom as much as they claim for two reasons. The first is that this “cost” is simply a loss of profit which will clear up almost as soon as the PSN goes back up (and straight back down due to the massive influx of several million players at once). The second: Capcom has done fine for nearly 30 years without digital downloads, ever heard of brick and morter stores? Not to mention that Steam and Xbox can also sell their titles with a bit of reworking.
Capcom can blame themselves for the DRM-ridden Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 being unplayable (along with several other games) by paying customers, way to go. Despite that, this shows that developers are being affected quite harshly by the outage and can set things back significantly. Still, I bet the PSN sales numbers will more than make up for the outage once it’s back up.
