How much did Sony’s recent PlayStation Network outage cost?
We’re frequently asked what the ROI on Antithesis is.
Antithesis creates value for users in many different ways, most notably by greatly increasing engineering velocity and developer productivity – but putting a number on this can be challenging because most companies don’t have super clean engineering productivity metrics.
But it’s much easier to measure the cost of an outage, especially one as large and public as the recent PlayStation Network (PSN) outage.
Here’s a back of envelope calculation, based on annualized figures from Sony’s Q2 report for FY 2024 (check out page 15).
Revenue from network services, representing PlayStation Plus and in-game advertising, was $1.059Bn for the quarter, annualized to $4.24Bn.
Revenue from gaming software sales – most of which happen online – was $3.68Bn, or $14.73Bn annualized.
In an attempt to placate their 100 million plus angry PSN customers, Sony just gave away 5 days of credits to every PlayStation Plus member, which works out to a cost of 5/365 × $4.24Bn = $58M in direct costs. This number is probably slightly inflated since advertising is factored in, but we can assume they’re trying to make things up to their advertisers too.
Since the entire PlayStation Network was down for 24 hours, no one could buy games, which works out to 1/365 × $14.73Bn, or $40M of lost revenue.
That’s a total of $98M in direct costs from this one outage – and this is the third and longest outage that PSN has suffered in the last 8 months. Let’s just say that $98M represents a very substantial ROI over the cost of Antithesis.
It’s almost certain that $98M overstates the immediate cost of this outage – we haven’t, for instance, dug into what portion of network services is ad revenue, or tried to model how many gamers merely postponed game purchases rather than changing their minds altogether. That said, we also haven’t attempted to quantify the longer term costs of this and other recent outages in lost customer goodwill, canceled subscriptions, or frustrated customers moving their playtime to other systems – and those costs will certainly be large.
As more and more games (even pure single player ones) require network access to play, the threat unreliable system software represents for a gaming platform is only growing.
We hope Sony’s found and fixed the root cause here – maybe autonomous testing and perfect reproduction would help?
