If anyone was on the fence about whether or not to trade in their PS3, the last few weeks seem to have caused them to make up their minds. The continuing PSN outage and security breaches are causing trade-ins of Sony’s console to blow up, say a number of retailers interviewed by Edge. PS3 trade-ins have doubled, and more people are going straight to a 360 instead of getting cash.
Twice as many people are buying FIFA 11 for 360 as for PS3, a pattern that likely extends to other games on both consoles. While PS3 sales are still hovering around a healthy 200,000 per month, this security disaster is costing companies like EA and Capcom millions upon millions in lost business, and while Sony’s loss of face is difficult to calculate monetarily, you better believe it’s worth a buck or two.
It’s not exactly a mass exodus, but in the console wars, a flesh wound like this hurts a lot more down the road, since it affects things like third party support and customer perceptions of reliability. It’s going to be a while before Sony walks this one off.