Sony announced on Thursday that the final step towards the full restoration of services impacted by the mid-April cyber attack that compromised the personal information of over 70 million customers has been completed. The company's VOD and music hub Qriocity is now available in all countries in which it was previously active - except Japan. Sorry, Japan.
As part of Sony's far-reaching efforts to quell customer angst, its PlayStation Network-focused "Welcome Back" program was extended to Qriocity customers as well. Both paying and non-paying subscribers to the service's "Music Unlimited" program are being offered replacement days to cover those lost during the weeks-long outage in addition to one-month of free access. Qriocity members are also privy to the same identity theft protection offered to PSN members back in May. The Debix AllClear ID PLUS service, which boasts 12 months of protection, will cease accepting applications on June 28th.
Despite all the talk about "full restoration," Sony has yet to reopen the PSN's online store to Japanese customers, though it had no problem providing details about Japan's "Welcome Back" package days prior to restoring online gameplay functionality to the country.
A story posted at video game news blog andriasang earlier this week suggested the store could be up June 8th, alluding to Japanese publisher Irem's note concerning the launch of a new download-only title on that day. It's been over 6 weeks now since the PSN store was shut down in Japan.
On June 1st, Sony announced the PSN store was finally back for gamers in North America. A day later, and Europe regained access as well. Gamers in both regions encountered some early technical issues when they attempted to download the promised free games, prompting some fear. Sony later issued a statement claiming the problems were only due to "high traffic."
