Report: PlayStation Network Outage Results In More Trade-Ins

A new report suggests more people are trading in their PlayStation 3 consoles with the PlayStation Network's continued down time.

Analysts have suggested Sony wouldn't see a long term impact coming from the outage, which began on April 20 and came after hackers infiltrated the PSN database. However, a report from British gaming site Edge, says retailers in the U.K. are seeing more consumers trade-in their PlayStation 3 consoles.

In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades. However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead, a store manager at a major UK retailer said anonymously to Edge.

Two other retailers which spoke to Edge, including Gameswap, admitted they were seeing an abundance of PS3 consoles to be traded in as of late. The guy from Gameswap said they had gotten 200 percent more PS3s already in May, compared to all of March. This could contrast the views of video game analysts, which are mostly confident that Sony will be relatively untouched from the ordeal.

Once the network is back up and secure, and once people calm down and realize they didn't lose anything, the damage will largely be repaired, said Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities. There are a few people who undoubtedly threw their PS3s in the trash, and likely a few thousand who bought an Xbox 360 over a PS3 due to the PSN outage, but I can't envision this number being more than a rounding error.

In an early April hack, perpetrators got access to 25 million consumers' account information. Sony hasn't set an exact date for when the PlayStation Network will return, but said it wanted to make sure everything was covered and people's data was entirely secure.

Follow Gabriel Perna on Twitter at @GabrielSPerna