VGCulture - On Sony & Valve Hack incidents

I just read an interesting article discussing on the two hacking incidents on Sony's PSN service and Valve's Steam service.  Mid-year 2011, Sony was hacked and millions of players' credit card information, addresses, names, etc. that was submitted to PSN when players bought things in the PSN store.  Just a few months ago, Valve also had a breach in the system and the same thing happened to them and their community.  What the article pointed out was that the reaction from the community is quite different seeing how both companies were hacked.  The announcement from Sony that player's information has been taken by the hacker surged uproar from the players and media.  The criticisms were relentless and were very prominent to the public.  When Valve got hacked, they didn't receive the same hostility as those involved with Sony's predicament.

There are a lot of factors we can account for, but I think one of the main differences was that Sony had to take their entire service down in order to secure each player's account and to cease any further damage to the system the hackers had already done which disable numerous programs and access to certain games among other things while Valve simply apologized for the incident and asked to have players keep an eye on their credit card balance.  Steam and all its functions still worked.  This staggering difference is notable as having no access to PSN and little information to the progress of the situation seemed to have made many PS3 players uneasy, confused and left in the dark.  Steam users knew exactly what was wrong as dozens of other companies have been hacked before Valve did throughout 2011 and thus possibly taught many of us how to deal with situations similar to it.

Sony's PSN was back up after a few weeks it shut down and continued to provide its service as usual and seemed to have done quite well in the digitally distributed games afterwards.  Valve just recently made another announcement of its on-going investigation on the hacking incident and letting players know that they're still with them and haven't abandoned the case yet.

With the hack incident that Sony faced, many other game companies as well as the players within their community have learned from it and deal with the situation a lot more clearly.  It's still not fun for any of us to be "hacked" and told that our information is in the hands of a hacker, but I guess we've learned to do something about it rather than pointing fingers and finding someone to blame.