Earlier today, Sony announced on their US PlayStation Blog that they will be offering free identity theft protection for all PlayStation Customers affected by the PSN outage. Now, the EU blog has confirmed that EU users will get similar protection, as well as more details on what else they"ll be giving as way of apologizing for the downtime - free games!
According to the blog Post, PS3 owners will be offered 2 free games out of a selection of 5, while PSP owners will be offered 2 free games out of a selection of 4. There"s no mention of what these games will be at this time, or if there will be any kind of restrictions in place - will owners of both consoles be allowed to claim 2 PS3 and 2 PSP games, or will there be some kind of limit? Is this a per-console offering, or a per-user one? Furthermore, no details were given if there was any kind of restriction or cut-off to count as an "active" PSN user. Many people would agree that all PSN account details were compromised, regardless as to when the accounts were last used.
Customers have a lot of reason to be angry at Sony - not only is their online services down, many have criticized Sony"s seemingly slow response to the situation, however giving away free games is certainly a step in the right direction to placate the many unhappy gamers out there. Interestingly, this is the exact same tactic Microsoft used when the Xbox Live service had difficulty over a two-week period in 2007, whereby they gave away an Xbox Live Arcade Game.